


The Dogs of Peace

by JackAmatus (StellaDraco)



Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout 3, Fallout 4, Fallout: New Vegas
Genre: Brainwashing, Brotherhood of Steel - Freeform, Child Soldiers, Competition, Confusion, Denver, Dogs, Enclave, F/M, Family, Fatherhood, Gen, Gender Identity, Idealism, Illnesses, Injury, Legion - Freeform, Literary References & Allusions, M/M, Mistaken Species, Multi, NCR, Non-Sexual Slavery, Not Really Character Death, Not a Dog, One-Sided Attraction, One-Sided Relationship, Other, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Parenthood, Past Brainwashing, Pride, Revolution, Rivalry, Skinwalkers - Freeform, Slavery, Stockholm Syndrome, Trans Character, Trans Male Character, Travel, Tribal, Unrequited Hate, Unrequited Love, Werewolves, transcendentalism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-02
Updated: 2017-01-02
Packaged: 2018-08-12 12:24:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 26
Words: 144,720
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7934509
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StellaDraco/pseuds/JackAmatus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Legion gets their dogs from Denver.  One day, they get something a bit different.  (The setting is exactly the same as the games, aside from the addition of a group of skin walkers in Denver and subsequent canon divergence.)  </p><p>Note: I don't notify of character death.  If figured it would work better to use the other three archive warnings though.<br/>Note: This is pretty dark, if the tags don't clue you in to that, it's gotten a bit darker than my typical work.  Tags and Pairings will be changed and added to as this goes on.  As this gets longer, I'd recommend DON'T READ THE TAGS IF YOU AREN'T CAUGHT UP.  There will be spoilers in the tags.  Fallout 4 is a bit of a spoiler in and of itself, but not a big one.  This will eventually end up moving to the Commonwealth even though it starts in Denver.<br/>I can't say this will or won't be as long as Some Other World, but I plan to make it novel-length.  That might not happen, but I plan to.<br/>I will probably make a fic for every possible game ending for Arcade.  You'll find out which one this is when it gets there.  Piebald is a different one, and I don't count my earlier fictions or Some Other World as they are too far from the canon of the universe.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

We had lived in the city at the foot of the mountains, a city of monsters some human, some beast, and some a little of both.  We had lived in Denver for longer than any of us had been alive, since before the Great War.  Life had been hard, but harder for those around us.  In the city of dogs, our pack had a rare advantage.  

We had known the gangs and soon, we had learned of the greatest gang.  The Legion.  Their men would come to take dogs and humans alike.  We had learned to keep hidden when they drew near.  The old ones rarely went out at all, but my sister and I had longed to explore.  We had read the books the elders gave us, listened to the stories of wonders long gone or long lost, places on the other sides of the world where we could never reach.  Or could we?  How could they expect us to read such things and never leave our home?  I had always known that realms like Paris and Japan would remain mere fantasies to me, but there were mountains, there were treasures and adventures within the ruined city, even.  There were unknown wonders to the East, to the West, in any direction I chose to seek them.  

I was a pup, at the time.  I was high on the world and more headstrong and reckless than my father knew how to handle.  He tried to contain me, but I always found a way to sneak out.  My sister joined me only because she worried.  On her own, she would be content with books, with her writing, with her art, idle in the pages of Jane Austen and scratching gardens and lily ponds on the walls in colored chalk and paint.  It was my fault that they had found her and if she had not joined me that day, I would have remained free.  

The Legion had found us lurking in the streets, watching them and wondering at the sights they might have seen.  They’d tried to catch her and I had stopped them.  They had bound me and dragged me to a cage, then back to their camp.  I’d been sold and traded and I fought.  I’d fought more than I had ever fought before.  When they had tried to move me, I had torn the chains from their hands.  When they had tried to cage me, I had slammed myself against the bars and doors.  When they had tried to feed me, they had met my teeth.  

I don’t know how long it lasted before the fury calmed.  It felt like years.  Gradually, the hunger wore me down, and the futility of it all.  I had stopped resisting, and things got easier.  They gave me food, water.  Women would come and clean my hair, keep the blood and dust from caking against my skin.  They gave me a name I can’t remember.  

I grew to trust them, to trust that they would keep me fed and healthy, and I could rest and would not be killed.  Slowly, the Legion became a comfort.  I still longed to see the wonders beyond the city I knew, but unable to escape, I settled for peace and safety.  It flew in the face of everything I had read and agreed with, but I couldn’t fight anymore.  Eventually, a man came to the camp.  His body smelled of blood and sweat, and half a dozen scents I couldn’t recognize.  He watched me with a crazed and eager eye.  

“Oh, give me that one.  Take her out and put her in the ring.  Let me see what she can do.”

I hardly registered the words.  Other men tied a chain around my neck and opened the door to lead me to an open, dusty ring I’d never seen before.  There was a man in the ring.  He stood before me wearing rags, soaked in sweat and blood and a dozen other fluids I didn’t want to think about.  He held a machete in his shaking hands and watched me the way the raiders looked at my father before he killed them.  

“Fight,” a Legion soldier ordered, prodding me with the butt of his rifle.  I looked back at him and was met with a glare.  He leveled the gun at me.  I turned back towards the man in rags.  

We knew what would happen without either of us needing to move.  He could neither flee nor face me and live, and I could not refuse to kill him.  

I would make this quick.  

I lunged and felt a blade glance off my shoulder.  I lost myself in the kill.  It was less the brutality than the power; after having no choice for so long, I finally had control over another person.  It was a high even more than the way I’d used to feel when I snuck out to explore alone.  

When the high faded, someone was speaking.  It wasn’t the man I’d heard before, it was someone else, a gravely, high-pitched voice that stuck in my ears like a bird call on a silent morning.  

He’d been talking for a while, arguing almost.  When I came to, he had won the debate.  

“She is coming with me, Anthony.”

“Yes, sir.”  The excited man spoke again, disappointed.  Someone came into the ring and led me to the man who had bought me.  That was the moment I met Vulpes Inculta. 


	2. The Dogs of War

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Vulpes and Coyote do Legion stuff.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> NOTE: I'm going to be doing my usual thing of switching between several narrators, changes in perspective are denoted by the * breaks while time lapses are ~. 
> 
> The first two chapters (not counting the prologue) are just setting up things for the main story. I didn't want to completely skip ahead for a lot of reasons, but these are a bit strange, plot-wise and were difficult to write decently.

We traveled South from Denver, back to the dam.  Traveling alone on most of my missions, I liked keeping a dog by my side.  The animals let me sleep when I needed to, barking if anything came near, and they could be very helpful in a fight.  I needed a dog to replace the last one, which had been lost to a cazador on the way back from my last mission.  Atlas had been strong, but he never learned when to run from a fight.  I hoped this dog would be different.  

I’d only been in Denver to coordinate with a courier spy traveling through the area, but I’d stayed in the main camp because it was our largest base in the area.  I hadn’t planned to get a dog until I’d seen this one.  Anthony had had his eye on her as his next breeding bitch, with Lupa growing steadily older.  

Most of the dogs we kept were similar breeds.  We chose the largest and the strongest and many of those were shaggy and powerfully built animals, but this dog was different.  Her fur alone, and her tail covered in it, matched that of the other dogs, though it was much softer.  Before her, Lupa had been our largest bitch, but this female stood even taller.  Her body was thin and slender with narrow but heavily muscled jaws and an unusually large skull.  Her claws were long and wickedly sharp, much sharper than those of the other dogs, and her thick teeth jutted out of her snout at slightly irregular angles.  Despite her small, floppy ears and wide, dark eyes, she struck a terrifying figure.  The men who’d trained her called her “omen.”  

As much as I had considered the dog’s appearance useful, I hadn’t wanted to buy her until I saw her fight.  It was not how she killed, but why.  The dog hesitated and only attacked not when she was prodded but when the gun was aimed at her.  She had not been shot, they would not have risked causing such injury to such a unique animal, and yet she feared the shot of the gun enough to obey.  And she had not attacked until forced, which I hoped had meant that she realized the slave was no real threat.  This dog was more intelligent than any I had yet owned.  

For the first day, she seemed to prove me wrong.  The dog traveled beside me, barking and sniffing and acting as any other would, glad to be off-lead.  I let her roam and trusted that she would not stray far and she didn’t.  For one day we traveled uneventfully, and then we stopped to rest.  In the camp, the dog had been caged.  She had caused such trouble upon capture that the trainers had refused to release her even after she seemed to calm down.  Knowing this, I didn’t plan to sleep deeply that first night.  I made camp in a hollow on a cliff face, overlooking the road to the Mojave.  

I had not been commander of the frumentari very long at all and my thoughts had been clinging to the daunting nature of that responsibility for days.  I was grateful for the distraction of the dog.  I found and killed a mole rat and cooked it, sharing half with the hound and watching her eat.  She had not been starved, despite he slender appearance.  She did not fall on her food like a starving animal; she ate slowly, calmly, taking her time and watching me as she ate, almost as if analyzing my motives.  

I did not typically interpret great intelligence from the simple actions of animals, even dogs, even back when this happened.  This dog was different.  I was not naive, nor was I stupid.  Dogs were animals and thus unintelligent, however I had heard more than one legend of creatures that only resembled dogs.  In the Legion, there was Lupa, the legendary Lupa, not the dog, the Capitoline Wolf, there were many stories about men becoming wolves and wolves becoming men, and a story I barely recalled from when I’d been very young warned of beings who could shift between human and canine forms.  I didn’t believe these stories, by any means, but I didn’t pretend to know everything about the world.  Maybe there was a chance that this dog possessed near-human intelligence, by some mutation or by science.  From the very start, I recognized something unnatural in her gaze, the same eerie aura that drove the dog trainers to call her “omen”.  Deep down, I knew this was no dog.  

After we ate, I had watched her, pondering names.  The dog had stayed perfectly still, standing where she had eaten and watching me before finally accepting that I would not stop her and lying down on the stone. I watched the firelight reflecting in her dark eyes and making her fur appear almost crimson until I likewise came to trust that she was not waiting to attack.  I fell asleep.  

I woke late that night to discover that the dog had fallen asleep as well.  The fire had died but the embers cast enough light to see that her form had changed.  No longer a dog, a young woman, roughly my own age, lay curled up on the stone beside me.  In the dark I saw her skin the same shade as the russet stone beneath her, her shaggy hair black, and her body as lean and powerful as it had been when she was a dog.  She was still asleep and did not wake, so I didn’t see her as a threat.  I didn’t know what to think.  I was younger than I am now and still very groggy at the time.  I tried to watch her, afraid to close my eyes again, not knowing what she really was, but I had yet to learn the skill to stave off sleep easily and I dozed off.  I woke again in the morning to find a dog beside me, lying with her head on her paws and watching a trader guide a pack brahmin along the road below us.  

I watched her for several minutes before the dog realized I was awake.  I had no idea what to say.  I didn’t know if she would understand me if I spoke to her.  Could she speak?  I didn’t know for certain what she was, but I believed there must be some scientific explanation.  Perhaps she was a genetic experiment?  

The dog looked towards me calmly, swinging her ears back submissively as if she’d been caught doing something wrong.  

“I know what you are, drop the act.”  I didn’t.  I had no real idea what she was, but uncertainty left me driven to seem in control.  And it worked.

The dog whimpered and lowered her ears further.  She answered in an eerily human voice.  “Okay.”

For a moment I just watched her.  She could speak.  I had questions.  But many of them refuted my earlier claim and if she knew that I knew nothing about her, she would know she could tell me anything she wanted and I would be forced to believe her.  And what did one ask a dog woman?

“What is your name?”

“Coyote.”

She answered immediately and I wasn’t sure she’d understood the question.  In size and appearance, she did resemble an unnaturally large Coyote.  

“Your _name_ , not what you appear to be.”

I may have imagined the aggressive note to her reply.  “I am _called_ Coyote.  I am a _man_.”

So she was human.  Perhaps she descended from some experiment to give humans the senses of dogs.  As I watched, she relaxed and sat up, scratching behind one ear with her foot.  

“Why do you retain the appearance of a dog?”

“I have seen what the Legion does to humans.”

“I have not demonstrated the same.”

“You have not had long to do so in my presence.”

I grinned very slightly.  “Don’t you trust me?”

Coyote hesitated, standing to stretch and yawn.  At length, she admitted.  “I trust that you will feed me, as they had.”

I frowned a bit.  She had little choice but to trust that I would feed her.  She trusted that I would keep her alive, and feared, presumably, that I would rape her as the Legion raped female slaves?  We did treat dogs better, but the treatment was not so different that I could conceive of another reason for her to fear revealing her real form.  

“Would you prefer to take human form, were you alone?”

She seemed to consider the idea.  She shrugged, as much as a dog can shrug.  “I draw more attention as a human, but I cannot interact with others as easily as a dog.  There are advantages and disadvantages to both forms.”  

It seemed a wise statement.  “I will not treat you as the Legion treats women slaves.”  I admitted, “You can take human form, if you wish.”

She watched me curiously.  “Would you prefer if I take human form?”

It was a very loaded question and I considered why she would ask.  She may have been wondering if I saw her as a person or a tool, or she may have sought to know if I simply found her attractive.  More likely, if I said yes, she would believe that I only valued her sexually and planned to go back on the promise I had just made.  I chose to answer honestly.  “I would prefer if you remained a dog, but I will treat you as a person when possible.”  Being a girl would make things difficult, not only because she had no clothes to wear, but because any Legion I ran into would be puzzled.  She would also attract attention, not just my own.  The view might have been better, but a dog was more useful and less noticeable.  I had valued the companionship of an animal on my many missions and patrols alone, and having someone to talk to would be an even greater improvement to solitude, whatever form she took.  She would be my companion when we were alone, and I would treat her as fairly as possible when we were in camp, but I could hardly insist that my dog be treated as a person when around other people.  

She seemed to appreciate my answer.  

I got up to pack the bedroll beneath me and Coyote asked softly, “What is your name?”

“Vulpes.”

She considered it.  “The fox.”

I looked over at her as I stuffed the rolled mat in my backpack.  “Yes.  You understand the language?”

“A little.  I know that word.”

I went back to packing and felt her watching me.  “It suits you.”

I raised an eyebrow.  

“It suits you,” Coyote repeated, nodding and slinking out of the cave.  I stood to make sure she was not leaving and saw that she had stopped just beyond the entrance, sniffing the ground.  

I had rarely considered such absurd things as how a dog-woman might act, but she was more animal than I had expected.  Although, she had lived for years as a dog, so perhaps this was just the result of her treatment by the trainers.  

It might seem strange if I arrived with a dog named so bluntly as Coyote.  I had another name I’d been considering.  Throwing the last of my supplies back into my pack, I followed her outside.  “Coyote?”

She emerged from a bush with blood on her muzzle, a half-eaten rattlesnake hanging from her jaws.  “Yes?”

“Would you object to a different name?”

She tilted her head, licking her lips around the carcass.  “My tribe has long held an unusual naming tradition.  I would not object.”

It surprised me that she had ever had a tribe, but I dismissed the revelation.  “Do you object to the name `Minerva’?”

“Minerva…”  She considered it.  “The Roman goddess of wisdom?  I do not object.”

“Good.”  

~      ~     ~

We spent several years together before Nipton, and before the second battle of Hoover Dam drew near.  Minerva reverted to human form when she slept, and she sometimes chose to take that form of her own volition, but only rarely.  As a dog, I grew to admire her skill in battle and her keen senses.  As a woman, I grew to appreciate her wisdom and thoughtful nature, even if I rarely saw her body.  She appeared human only when sleeping until one morning a few months before Nipton.  

I had thought that we were comfortable with each other before then, but that was the day I realized that she finally trusted me.  

I woke up to quiet singing.  We had camped in an abandoned pre-war house and slept on old but intact mattresses for a change.  The night was cold and the house had blankets we didn’t plan to take with us.  When I opened my eyes, Minerva sat on the bed on the other side of the small bedroom.  She had her legs pulled up against her chest and her arms held three blankets wrapped around her slender form.  She stared out the window at the rising sun, letting her hair fall into her eyes as she softly sang a song I’d never heard before.  

“Oh, give me land, lots of land, under starry skies above…”  She noticed that I was awake and fell silent.  As a dog, she often appeared to be smiling, but I had dismissed that as an effect of the heat and the shape of her muzzle.  As a woman, I saw that my assumption had been false.  When I had first awakened, she was smiling.  Her expression seemed impossibly peaceful and content, considering I’d seen this woman sink her teeth into the necks of over a hundred men and tear their throats out.  She looked more peaceful than anyone I had ever seen in my entire life.  

When she noticed that I was awake, her smile faded to a focused stare that likely mirrored my usual expression, even if I appeared more relaxed at the moment.  I had felt impertinent to examine her too closely while she’d been asleep, though her general shape had been impossible to miss.  Now that she was awake and partly shrouded in blankets, I looked at her more closely.  

Coyote’s hair hung well beyond her shoulders, draping her back and framing her face in tangled, ebony curtains.  Her eyes were dark and wide, not brown as dog’s eyes often were, but very dark military green.  They sat angled in a round face with a strong jaw that almost looked masculine.  Her slender body retained more clearly defined muscles than any Legion women; in build she resembled the few female rangers we’d captured.  Curled as she was, I couldn’t accurately judge her height.  

In the Legion, women sang to children and, supposedly, some men sang to their wives or perhaps each other, but singing was not common.  Women were often ill or unhappy, and song did not come well if it came at all.  Coyote’s voice was unique.  As with all her speech, the tone remained distorted, like I was hearing it through a speaker with just a hint of static, but it was beautiful.  

With the woman so often in canine form, I never considered what I might feel towards her.  I saw her in human form sometimes, of course, and was inevitably attracted— she remained a stunning woman in appearance— but I had kept my impression of her as a person very separate from my impression of her as my companion.  She spoke wisely and showed both humor and intellect, but her mental acuity may as well have been a radio broadcast.  Now she sat across from me, only a few feet away in the small room, uncomfortably close now that she was human in form as well as mind.  

Coyote’s eyes flicked away from my own.  “Sorry.  I didn’t mean to wake you.”

“It isn’t a problem.”  I sat up to face her and she shifted her legs and blankets to mirror my position.  “Do you sing often?”

“No.  I haven’t sung much at all lately.  But I used to love it.”

I frowned at her.  I had never thought in great detail about how she was captured.  I suppose she hardly volunteered for the Legion, in all likelihood we had much the same history in that regard.  “You couldn’t sing as a dog.”

She tilted her head and then shook it.  “Well, not exactly.  I…”  Coyote stared out the window thoughtfully.  At length, she admitted, “I used to sing all the time before I was captured.  And then I didn’t sing because people would know that I wasn’t a dog, and then I just… I didn’t want to.”

“But now you do want to?”  I didn’t admit that I’d begun to hope I was the reason for her happiness.  

“I’m alive,” Coyote admitted, smiling again, “And I’m reasonably comfortable and well fed, and not alone.  I have you.  And we’re out here, traveling, seeing the world and killing things, and people, and I’m happy.”  

I nodded, considering my own perspective.  I was glad to be alive, and comfortable, well-fed, and with her.  Traveling was its own haven; we were not restrained by the law of the Legion, we were beyond its reach.  

And yet we weren’t.  Whatever the distance, I could not conceive of fleeing the Legion or completely disregarding its rules.  The Legion was the society I knew, and all others were corrupt and impure.  If we fled, the Legion would surely find us or we would die in the wasteland.  The Legion would prevail.  The Legion was right.  

“I’m happy too.”

~       ~       ~

After that she spent much more time as a woman.  Between the two of us, we could usually see any living thing well before it saw us.  When we approached traders, soldiers, caravans, or dangerous animals, I traveled with a fierce and loyal hound, and when we were alone a beautiful woman walked beside me.  Watching her transform was less jarring than I had expected, but more unsettling.  I had imagined a grinding of flesh and bone as features jutted out or flattened but instead she changed so subtly that it was barely noticeable at first.  I often thought that she had paused the transformation halfway through until I grew accustomed to the gradual nature of the shift.  As much as it fascinated me, I did not like watching her change mainly for one reason.  I could accept her as a dog with a woman’s mind, and I could, much more eagerly, accept her as a woman, but she shifted form while walking and this resulted in, for several minutes each change, either an unnatural and eerily jointed dog strolling along with human posture or a beautiful woman scrambling over the desert rocks on all fours.  

She did not crawl, of course, she walked on her hands and feet, knees bent, moving as children did who had been raised by animals.  I’d seen one once when I’d been very young.  My mother, matriarch of our tribe, had brought a boy home from a trip to clear deathclaws from a canyon our hunters used to reach the mountains.  The boy had been raised by wild dogs, and he didn’t speak.  He moved in the same eerie way that Coyote sometimes did and shared many of her mannerisms.  At the time, I had through of him as an oddly human animal, and he had inevitably returned to the wild within days of his capture, but Coyote clearly demonstrated intelligence beyond that of a feral human.  Her mannerisms made sense, given her life, but they did disturb me and I felt irrevocably glad whenever she mimicked my own instead.  

Today my mission was to find and capture a ranger.  He would know the NCR’s plans and we were to get them out of him, one way or another.  The man was skilled, but no veteran, and we’d found his old camp a few days back.  He’d moved on, heading northwest, around the brim of the Mojave towards Prim.  We would catch him before he made it that far.  Coyote had his scent and could apparently continue to track him even when human, as she was now.  Clothing would have been more suspicious than a nude companion, so she wore nothing and she seemed comfortable traveling that way.  She walked beside me, back straight and head held high, looking around.  

I could focus when I needed to, but knowing that the ranger was still a safe distance away, I studied Coyote’s figure while the sun set.  Now that she walked beside me as a woman, I had quickly noticed that she was actually taller than I was and stood almost six feet.  Aside from a handful of freckles over her shoulders and back, her skin was unblemished.  She had no scars, no cuts, no pimples.  Come to think of it, I’d never seen the woman injured.  Most Legion women were unhealthy and thin, even the more well-fed ones, but traveling with me, Coyote ate as she saw fit and was free to hunt whole big-horners, if she desired.  Walking as far as we walked every day, this did not make her fat but muscular.  Used to the bony hips and visible ribs of Legion women, I deeply appreciated Coyote’s smooth sides and pleasantly round rear.  I couldn’t see her breasts from this angle, but they were also healthy, even if she often folded her arms to cover them, as she was doing now.  

As darkness fell, we neared the ranger’s camp.  He’d taken refuge in a shack and lit a fire to cook a can of pork and beans.  Coyote stopped well beyond the light of his fire and became a dog and I crouched beside her and contemplated our tactics.  “We wait until he’s asleep,” I whispered and she nodded.  As a dog, she lay beside me, watching and waiting until we were both certain that the ranger had dozed off.  

I moved in first.  The ranger woke to my boot on his face and his hands and feet already bound.  “Does the NCR plan to move against the Great Khans again?”

The hint of fear in his glare told me that he’d recognized me.  “Vulpes Inculta!”  NCR conditioning snapped back into place, “Fuck off!”  I kicked him in the ribs and let him sit upright on the ground.  

“You will tell me what I wish to know, one way or another.”  I picked up the rod he’s used to hold the can of food over the fire and ran it through the flames until the metal glowed red.  

Coyote prowled around the camp, pacing in front of the ranger and behind both me and the fire.  The ranger caught sight of her for the first time and laughed.  “What, you don’t even have any men with you, just your dog?  You fucking idiot, no wonder the NCR’s going to win, you’ll get killed by a cazador walking around alone with just a stupid dog.  What?  She your girlfriend or something?”  I very nearly swung the metal rod at him right then, but I restrained myself and he kept talking.  “Yeah, that’s it, isn’t it.  That’s why the Legion are all guys with dogs, you fucking pricks.  You’re all just screwing your bitches!”

Coyote had crossed the distance to the ranger before my rage won out against my monumental self-control.  She shifted partly to human form, standing on her hind legs as a horribly unnatural canine hybrid, dark eyes wide and human in a snarling, bald canine face.  I found her appearance evoked a deep instinctual terror even in myself, though I resisted it, but the ranger, with her gleaming, dripping fangs inches from his face, promptly pissed himself.  Coyote spoke in a deep and eerie mimicry of Lanius’ intimidating tone.  “I am no bitch.  You will answer his questions or I will devour you piece by piece!”  It was an empty threat, in theory.  This was how our interrogations typically went, and Coyote often came up with brutal and creative threats which she never carried out.  That day was no different.  The man confessed every secret he knew and I’m sure he would have gone on to share irrelevant details of his private life had I asked.  His composure dissolved and he was a blubbering mess from the time Coyote threatened him until I executed him.  This was standard fare, even if his insults had cut us more deeply than usual.  Most rangers said nothing, or goaded me based on Legion morals.  This was the first time their words had truly gotten under my skin and I didn’t miss the significance of that fact.  

We killed that ranger and left his corpse for feral ghouls.  


	3. Snake Eyes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A very fateful ranger shows up.

We harried the NCR directly for so long that I became very used to it.  I came to view Vulpes as a close friend, and my only real ally in this place, the only person I could trust.  I relaxed around him and for the first time as an adult, I felt human again.  Wandering the wasteland, tracking rangers and harassing NCR outposts and camps, we saw few enough people that I spent the majority of my time as a woman.  I became almost comfortable with the unfamiliar body.  I hardly became a dog unless we were facing the NCR in person, and such meetings so consistently ended in conflict that I became aggressive towards strangers as soon as I saw them.  I did not attack unless ordered, but I could not relax.  Even when we had to visit Caesar and the Legion camps, or the Strip, I found myself snarling at anyone who approached us.  They were unfamiliar, thus they were enemies, my instincts insisted.  Even among the vicious dogs of the Legion, I earned a reputation as a mean and dangerous animal.  

In stark contrast to my canine persona, I found that I became completely at ease around Vulpes.  I’d had little choice but to trust him when he’d bought me and, in time, that trust had become both absolute and genuine.  We were partners.  I followed his orders without question and I had recently begun to suspect that he had as much faith in my senses and the few suggestions that I made.  I had never had a mind for time and wandering the wastes, often tracking a target for several days, I could only guess that it had been years.  We had spent years tracking down rangers, harassing camps, and surveying the movements of all facets of the NCR, roaming throughout the Mojave and beyond its borders.  With so many successful missions, sooner or later, we were bound to hit a snag.  I only wish I’d foreseen it.  

It happened only a few days after Searchlight, our greatest victory to that point.  Vulpes and I agreed that such a bold move would drive the NCR to seek us out at any cost, for a time, and we fled into the mountains to lay low.  We made camp near Red Rock Canyon, avoiding the harsh cold so we could camp outdoors.  The prevalent cazadors and the Khans seemed like all the defenses we would need so we’d relaxed.  We’d been wrong.  

I knew even then that I would never be the child I had once been; I could never be that naive and blissfully ignorant again.  The world was not perfect and never would be, though I’d found, to my surprise, that I could still revel in the beauty of the natural world, mutated or not.  I preferred to be outdoors and Vulpes both knew and respected that, though he did not fully know why.  Neither of us said much.  We only spoke when we wanted to, so most of the time we enjoyed each other’s company in silence and such was the case for most of those first days after Searchlight.  We stayed alert for threats, but expected none so we let our focus wander.  I studied the auburn hues of the rocks during the day and watched the ocean of stars above us at night.  I had never seen an ocean, but I imagined that one would look much like that vast sparkling blue abyss, aside from the fact that it would ripple and move like smaller bodies of water.  I hoped that one day the Legion would conquer the NCR, and I would finally see a coastline.  So many books spoke of the beach and the sea that they must be spectacular.  

A desert had its own stark beauty, a beauty like fire, and one I had also dreamed of seeing in my youth.  I could not say that I would have sacrificed the sight to have never been captured by the Legion.  I could not decide if I would rather have never known slavery or never fulfilled my greatest dream.  With the Legion, I had seen more of the world than I would have ever known had I stayed with my family, and I did not trust that I would have had the courage to leave them on my own had I not endured what I had in the Legion kennels.  

Vulpes found it easy to occupy himself, a truth I had always attributed to an active imagination and a familiarity with boring stakeouts, but I had noticed another possible explanation.  Of course, most of the time, he really was just lost in thought, but I did catch him admiring my body on more than one occasion.  I suppose he found me attractive, or simply appreciated the female figure.  I wasn’t sure how I felt about that. 

*       *       *

“Coyote?”

We were normally silent and she clearly had not expected me to speak.  She jolted and turned to look at me.  We sat on sleeping bags; she faced towards the canyon while I tended the fire between us, facing the same direction.  She looked over her shoulder, still sitting with her back straight and her legs folded underneath her.  “Yes?”

I hesitated.  I didn’t often ask this sort of question, even to her, but I knew her too well to expect that anything would happen if I didn’t speak to her directly about it.  “What do you think of me?”

Coyote frowned at me uncertainly.  “I trust you, if that’s what you mean.  And I appreciate your company.”  She got up on all fours to turn and face me, sitting with her legs crossed beneath her as she resettled and resting her hands on her calves.  The motion concealed nothing, focusing on comfort rather than modesty and leaving her completely exposed to me.  I found myself visibly distracted but forced my gaze back to her eyes.  Still looking more curious than pleased or annoyed, Coyote quickly folded her arms over her chest and began to move into a kneeling position until I rested a hand on her knee.  

“I don’t mind.”

She let her legs drop back into the position they’d been in but did not unfold her arms from her chest.  She tilted her head at me.  “You meant something a bit different, didn’t you?”

I hoped that my expression managed to be seductive and not threatening.  “Yes.”

I was not a virgin, far from it in fact.  I had learned how to please women in order to utilize my looks to gain information, but I rarely needed to do so.  Since I’d grown close to Coyote, I actively avoided doing so, using other methods to gain such information instead.  I slept with Legion women, as all high-ranking officers did, but I had no wives.  Many men in the Legion had several wives, and Caesar demanded that all did their part to sire Legion boys, but I maintained no relationship with the women I had sex with.  Some were pregnant, but I had no children yet and the women were no more than sexual partners; I did not care for them the way I had grown to care for Coyote.  If she had been known to the Legion as a woman, I would have married her, though I knew she would never be happy with the life of a Legion wife.  I knew I could be seductive, but I had only ever done so under false pretenses and I felt illogically terrified that I would say or do something to put her off.  

Coyote’s reaction remained frustratingly opaque.  “Are you asking if I find you attractive?  I do.”  She paused, shifting forward awkwardly and stretching out her legs in front of her.  “You’re intelligent and physically very…pleasing.”  She managed to seem less confident than I felt right now.  I could feel my heart pounding and wondered if, with her incredible senses, she could hear that.  

When I dealt with other women, I trusted my instincts and had been told that I did well.  Dealing with Coyote, I felt like a boy again, trying to judge how to act and desperately hoping that I wouldn’t mess things up.  I didn’t know if I could trust the urge I had to kiss her.  I took the risk.  

She pulled back when our lips met, but then relaxed.  Coyote returned the kiss passionately.  One of her hands slid forward to rest on my upper thigh and I pushed forward, easing her back onto the sleeping bag.  We started making out.  Coyote grabbed my waist.  Too focused on the kiss to see what she was doing, she felt around to the front of my Legion kilt and ran her hand up my thigh.  My fingers traced the curves of her breasts and followed her belly down to her crotch.  I heard a sharp intake of breath and she broke the kiss as I gripped her inner thighs.  

I’d thought it was pleasure, but I’d been wrong.  

Coyote sprang to her feet, taking canine form and snarling in a move that knocked me onto my side before I even heard the shot.  A high caliber rifle round caught Minerva in the shoulder and launched her halfway across the campsite.  I scrambled for my pistol while she rolled to her feet, her shoulder torn open down to the bone.  I’d never seen her shot before and only my training let me focus on the ranger who had ambushed us.  He crouched on a rock to the south, turning his anti-material rifle my way.  

I shot and grazed his ear.  His next shot scraped the sole of my boot as I dove for cover.  I aimed again and Coyote flew at the ranger in a running leap that knocked him out of my sight.  

*      *      *

I tackled the ranger from a dead sprint, knocking him back off the rock and landing thirty feet below near an old cazador nest.  I lunged for his throat, clamping my jaws down hard and aiming to kill him but an arm struck my chest and shoved me back.  My fangs closed short of their aim, shredding the very front of his neck but missing anything vital.  The ranger flung me aside onto my shoulder, which had already begun to heal.  He aimed his gun at me a second time but was preempted as Vulpes charged at him with a machete.  

The frumentari knocked him to the ground and they rolled.  Vulpes tried to slash and the ranger grabbed his hands, but he grabbed the ranger’s rifle.  I got to my feet and watched, helpless, as the flesh knit across my shoulder.  Both of them moved so quickly that, if I attacked, I would be biting blindly.  

Vulpes tore his machete free and tried to force it into the ranger’s throat, but the other man pinned his arm.  For several seconds my friend strained against his opponent, pointing the blade at the other man’s neck and even leaving a thin red line in the skin, but unable to do any serious damage.  The ranger shoved him away and swung his rifle faster than I could intervene.  The butt of the gun struck Vulpes in the head with a sickening smack and I was on the ranger before he could do any more damage.  

My claws raked his back and he shook me off and scrambled away from us.  I saw the horror as he noticed my shoulder, which no longer bore even a scratch.  I snarled, doing anything I could to capitalize on his fear and the man froze.  

Vulpes wasn’t moving.  I realized this while I stared down the ranger.  I had no idea if he was even alive, but if he was, I could not leave him here any more than I could kill this ranger.  Sooner or later, one of his shots would strike a more vital area, or a bullet would embed in my ever-healing skin and I would die of lead-poisoning.  Praying the ranger wouldn’t follow us, I grabbed Vulpes and fled.  I didn’t realize the greater problem until much later.  I had bitten the ranger and let him live.  

~        ~        ~

I fled into the mountains.  I knew there were mines up there and had hoped to hide in one of those, but I found a trapdoor in the ground before I found a mine.  The corrugated metal looked more intact than most, possibly because it was high-quality steel.  Inside, I found a ladder and a short hallway and dragged Vulpes inside.  I shut the door as quietly as I could and hoped the dirt would slide down to cover it so no one would find us.  

Emergency lighting, or at least dim lighting that I presumed only operated at minimal power, lit the cold hallway and the terminal at one end.  Scenting the air, I detected no recent visitors.  This place had been empty for years, maybe even a decade, maybe even longer than I’d been alive.  This was old world technology, but not quite old world use.  Or at least the entry tunnel had been visited more recently; I couldn’t get past the doors to the rest of the bunker, and a quick examination of the terminal confirmed that I wasn’t getting through that way either.  This place was high security.  If the Legion had this kind of tech, no one would be able to stop us, but I had never been good at hacking.  I could manage a very basic terminal, but this was much more advanced, the most advanced coding I’d ever seen, in fact.  And I had bigger problems.  

I pulled Vulpes in front of the door, making sure that we’d have the maximum distance from our attacker should anyone find us down here.  I didn’t like being unable to see approaching danger, but we couldn’t survive in the open on these cold mountains and I couldn’t risk moving him farther away.  He was breathing, but the side of his head had caked with blood and he seemed to be deeply asleep.  I knew only the first aid the Legion had taught him; this was far beyond my skill to deal with.  I stretched him out and for several minutes I just watched him before I realized how very cold it was in this bunker.  Whatever heating system might have existed here, it was clearly inactive, leaving the metal grate over the floor to conduct the freezing temperatures of the mountains outside.  I lay beside Vulpes and curled myself against him, hoping that our combined body heat would at least stave off hypothermia.  This wasn’t the first time I wished I had clothes, though I understood why it was more practical to be nude.  

*       *        *

I woke up groggy and in incredible pain.  My left ear seemed to have filled with blood, I could only hear out of my right.  My skull was pounding despite the cold numbing most of my body.  Coyote lay beside me in human form, fast asleep.  I’d seen her heal small cuts and scrapes within minutes, but that was no different from the effect of some implants; I was amazed to see that her demolished shoulder had mended completely to the point that I could no longer determine which shoulder had been injured in the first place.  

She had curled up beside me, no doubt trying to keep us both warm in the freezing metal hall.  We were in a bunker and at first I thought that she had somehow dragged me to Hidden Valley before I noticed the differences in design and the meaning of the freezing temperatures.  We were higher in the mountains, in a bunker I had never found or heard of.  Glancing around, I recognized that the technology was much more advanced than other bunkers I had been in.  A large terminal behind me suggested that a password was needed to access the rest of the bunker.  I tried the terminal when I had recovered a bit more and learned that the passcode was much too complex to hack.  

Coyote woke while I pieced together our location.  

“You’re alive!”  The woman nuzzled my cheek and wrapped her arms around me.  

I kissed her and this time she kissed me back immediately.  

~        ~        ~

It was lucky that this was early summer and not winter, or the cold might well have killed us.  As it was, I recovered slowly.  This was probably a skull fracture and Legion treatment for those remained limited to “wait and see.”  For the first day I was too dizzy to do much of anything and after that the mountains were hit with an unseasonably late blizzard.  Coyote kept the trap door clear but was soon forced to pack the snow into a wall which would keep us from suffocating and conceal our presence, but the steep wall of what soon became ice made it impossible for anyone without claws to climb out.  Coyote left to hunt and we could survive, but for several weeks I was trapped waiting for the snow to melt.  Once my skull recovered enough that I felt healthy, I had very little to do to occupy myself.  When alone, I paced and kept myself in shape when I wasn’t asleep.  When Coyote was there, I had other ways to stay busy.  While I recovered, she sang or told me stories when I seemed bored.  Her singing remained lovely and she knew a wide range of songs even if she didn’t remember the full lyrics of some of them.  She sang songs I’d never heard, old world songs she claimed she’d picked up from holotapes.  She’d lived in a library as a child, she told me, and she’d grown up reading the books and listening to the library’s vast holotape archives.  Her stories presumably came from the same source.  She told over a dozen stories; she spoke of a fugitive in a place called France, a violent Scottish king, a mad-man who wore armor and fought windmills, and a sea captain who obsessed over killing something called a whale.  In most cases I found myself less interested in the story and more glad to see how much she enjoyed the telling.  Coyote lit up when she reiterated these books she’d read.  Her normally content smile became a dazzling grin.  The story about the man who styled himself a “knight” called to mind the Brotherhood of Steel more than anything else and when I asked what exactly a dragon was, Coyote summarized and then launched into the strangest story I’d heard yet, detailing the adventure of something called a Hobbit.  Amid dozens of other oddities, I happened to ask what exactly an elf was and she explained that they sounded like very pretty ghouls with pointed ears.  That story clearly resided in the realm of fiction, but I wasn’t sure if the same was true of the one I liked the best.  Of all the stories she told, I found myself most fascinated by a tale of a brilliant detective solving cases that no one else could solve.  The puzzle of every case interested me more than the characters in the other stories and Coyote knew several different tales featuring this same detective and his companion, a man named Watson.  She told stories most days, as we had little else to do.  She continued telling stories and singing even after I recovered enough for other things, but soon she only talked when we were both too tired for other things.  

Trapped in a freezing bunker with a nude and beautiful woman I cared for very deeply, sex became almost inevitable.  On a particularly cold night, Coyote kissed me and one thing led to another.  For a woman who had never worn or requested clothes in all the years I had known her, she could be surprisingly modest.  Trained how to get information through sex and generally preferring to pleasure my partners more directly, I liked to stimulate her orally and this seemed to make Coyote uncomfortable.  When I asked her, she avoided the subject, probably because we were stuck together indefinitely.  Her discomfort did not abate, to the point that after three different sessions in which I changed my techniques each time, I gave up and resigned myself to leaving her alone until she would talk about it.  

*        *        *

The blizzard had stopped but tonight the snow had resumed.  I cleared the entrance of the bunker as best as I could and slunk out into the storm, letting the falling snow cover my pelt and paint me as white as the world around me.  Even the sky looked like snow, bulges of grey and white like snow drifts mirrored above the mountains.  It reminded me of the peaks back home, the cloudy, smoky city I hadn’t seen since my childhood.  At this point I couldn’t decide if I could still call that city of dogs my home anymore.  

I’d driven the bighorners nearby downhill but I smelled another group to the west.  In the bitter cold and driving wind, they would be dinner tonight.  Slinking up the road, I found them in a town I had seen, but never looked at closely.  I smelled mutants, lots of them.  I’d always presumed the town lay empty, but I’d been wrong, and so many mutants so close by concerned me, though there was nothing I could do about that at the time.  The snow had driven them inside, or else the lateness of the hour had done so.  I crept towards the herd as carefully as possible.  I could not risk getting myself killed, and every sense strained to detect danger.  The bighorners were no threat and we were alone; they completely failed to notice my presence.  As the sun began to set, I took a calf and scattered the herd.  The panicked cries alerted the mutants and I heard a door open.  I grabbed the dead calf in my arms and fled, running upright as fast as my clawed feet could carry me.  At the entrance of the town walls, I heard no sign of pursuit and paused, panting for breath, to look back.  

A human man stood in the door of the lodge, a mutant in a straw hat standing behind him.  I ignored the mutant, but studied the man.  From this distance, I could not see his expression, or even his face, but I felt him watching me.  No doubt, I struck a frightening figure in the snow of this remote town, but he seemed more thoughtful than afraid.  The first human aside from Vulpes who truly appeared immune to the terror I could evoke.  

I grabbed the calf and retreated to the bunker before the man could come after me.  

I found Vulpes as frustrated as I had left him.  He hid it well, but I knew him better.  He couldn’t figure out what it was I found so uncomfortable, and I would never admit it myself.  It was a simple problem, really, but not one either of us could easily fix.  I had no idea if I would ever be able to fix it at the time, and telling him wouldn’t accomplish anything.  I knew it might well make things worse if he knew.  Vulpes was my friend, and I trusted him with my life, but he had never seemed very open minded.  He accepted me as a woman and an equal, and he accepted that whatever I was, I should be treated as a person, but he still had a very traditional outlook on other things.  He did not drink, he did not use drugs, even stimpaks.  Neither did I, I admit, but in truth he just seemed to take the Legion values much more seriously.  I couldn’t imagine living without him and whatever he thought of me, we were partners under the Legion flag.  I relied on him and he needed my help to complete the missions he was tasked with.  I couldn’t complicate that with a truth I couldn’t act on anyway.  Besides, I was too afraid that he might reject me because of it.  I had no other life.  I could not serve the Legion as a woman without Vulpes and I could not prove myself a man, and I had no other allegiance nor any other cause to call my own.  This life was all I knew.  

*       *       *

Coyote cooked and we shared the meal she had caught.  “There is a man,” she explained while we ate, “living with the super mutants.”  

“Why?”  I finished the meal quickly.  

Coyote shrugged.  “I couldn’t risk investigating.  He saw me.”

“He saw you?”  I found myself feeling irrationally jealous at the idea that another man had seen her, assuming she’d been a woman at the time.  

Coyote must have recognized that note in my reply because she frowned.  “Yes, but not as a human.  I was a dog.  Hybrid in appearance.  And he was old, at least fifty.”  

That comforted me a bit.  Now I found myself more concerned at the reasons a man of that age might be living alone with mutants.  “How was he dressed?”

“He didn’t look military, if that’s what you’re asking.  He wore plain clothes.  Pants, a shirt, some kind of shoes, I guess?  Glasses.”  

So he wasn’t likely to be a member of the Enclave, the group which had supposedly created the mutants.  He was probably some random settler.  Still, I should look into it when I had time.  

Coyote fell silent as we ate.  For several hours afterwards, we sat in silence as the bunker grew steadily colder.  We both knew we had to stay close to keep warm so when Coyote got up and moved over to me, I presumed that was her intention.  I’d been wrong.  

Coyote kissed me.  She caught me completely by surprise when, for the first time, she initiated sex.  Either she’d gotten over her awkwardness or she hid it very well.  Foolishly, I assumed the former. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> After this, the plot is really going to start in the next chapter. And I'm trying to stay a bit away from smut, but it might happen. This chapter will probably be as smutty as I get with M/F pairings, though, honestly. ^_^'


	4. Swept Away

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A short chapter. Guess who's showing up in the next one.

When the snow melted, we trekked back toward Cottonwood Cove, heading for the raft to report to Fortification Hill.  Despite the snow in the mountains, none of the precipitation had made it into the Mojave.  Throughout our journey the ground was parched and gusts of wind blew dust in great curtains across the wastes.  The hot dry air burned my lungs, as it always did, but it was worse.  We filled our canteens from the snow and let it melt, but we were out of water in just over a day.  The air sapped moisture from our bodies as we walked until my eyes stung and I panted uncontrollably, whatever form I was in.  I stayed human.  We saw no one, so Vulpes had no reason to comment on my form.  In truth, I no longer had much reason to be uncomfortable with my body.  I was more comfortable now than when we’d had sex, and the comparison hung in the back of my mind to keep me at peace with my form.  I would rather be a woman than a bitch.  

The dry air would have cracked my canine nose anyway.  As it was, my sense of smell grew weak.  My nose burned in the dust more so than my lungs and it struggled to find even the smallest fragments of scent on the sandy wind.  We walked, as always, with single-minded purpose, but it was worse this time.  Unless we reached the river, we had no water, and unwilling to rely on the wells of settlements and ruins we passed, we had to get there or we would die.  We turned due east when our situation got dire, risking the threat of NCR troopers and rangers to reach Lake Mead and head south from there.  Quenched, we skirted the dam and followed the river.  

We were not stupid; the water level had dropped low enough to expose what few plants had grown below its surface and we knew rain had to come soon.  We avoided the water’s edge and never stopped less than thirty feet above the riverbanks.  We made it most of the way to the cove without incident.  Yesterday we’d passed deathclaws on the opposite shore, drinking from what little water remained, but they didn’t seem to notice us and looked more desperate than we were.  As the sun set, we made camp fifty feet above the shore on a rocky ledge.  I brought down a fire gecko for dinner and, as the only one I’d seen had been gigantic, we had a feast.  After we ate, I watched the sun set and the stars fill the sky.  I felt Vulpes watching me but couldn’t be sure what to expect today.  Sometimes he spoke about our latest mission.  Sometimes he got up and kissed me.  Sometimes he just let his mind wander, I guess.  I suppose he started looking my way and then he began thinking about something.  I wondered what he was thinking about, but didn’t ask.  

Whatever he was wondering today, I didn’t find out.  My keen hearing caught something, maybe a growl or maybe a rumble.  Maybe thunder.  Instantly my instincts were screaming at me to run and I didn’t know why.  I stayed, foolishly, and looked around.  Straining my eyes against the gathering darkness but too young even after all our time in the wilderness, to realize why I felt so frightened.  There had never been a spring like this one, and never a month as dry as this last had been in the Mojave.  At least not in recent memory.  

Vulpes noticed my concern.  

“What is it?”

“I hear something.”

He looked around and drew the wrong conclusion.  “Man or beast?  What happened to the ranger who attacked us?”

“He’s alive.”  I heard nothing more and shook my head, ignoring my lingering sense that something was gravely wrong.  “I don’t hear anything more.  The ranger… I bit the ranger.”

He gave me the flat stare he usually reserved for recruits, though this one had a hint of curiosity.  “The man had a very obvious bite on his throat, of course you bit him.  You tear the throats from dozens of men every week, usually in a similar fashion.”

I shook my head, sniffing for any threat I might have noticed while I replied.  “You don’t understand.  I bit him and did not kill him.  It is likely the reason he could not pursue us, but it means he will be far more dangerous if he ever finds us again.”

“Why?”

“This…condition…  What I am… it’s contagious.  If my saliva enters the bloodstream, it can infect other people.”  I saw the unspoken question in his stare and added, “Saliva to blood only, and only in large quantities.  I need to bite someone to pass it on.  The ranger is, in all likelihood, what I am by now.”

“You never mentioned that you could pass on the ability to take canine form.  Or heal so spectacularly.”

I snorted.  “I wouldn’t exactly call it spectacular.”

He moved closer to me while I heard another rumble and looked up.  Once again, I saw nothing.  I looked back at Vulpes to find him holding out one arm.  

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because this isn’t pleasant.”

“I admit, changing forms does not look…appealing, but the strength, heightened senses, and near immortality would make the Legion invincible.”  

He certainly knew how to convince me.  With the Legion transformed into skinwalkers, we could take the entire NCR easily, perhaps even the entirety of what had once been America.  I could be able to see the world under the orders of Caesar.  

But there was a catch.  I met his gaze, but my smile faded.  “This would not be the easy victory you might hope for.  What I am… females rarely survive childbirth, and nearly all infants are stillborn.”

He pulled his arm slightly away from me and frowned.  I could tell he was judging the truth of my statement and he saw it in my unblinking eyes.  “How does a species like that survive?”

“We survive because we are not a species.”  I brushed my hair back over my shoulders and pulled my legs against my chest.  “We are a plague.  We bite others to swell our ranks.  My mother was bitten and so was I.  My father is the leader of our tribe, the one who had infected most of the others, but I never knew my real father.”

Vulpes considered that reality.  “You were infected as a child.  How young?  You are all infertile, you’re certain of this?”  

“An infant.  I don’t remember anything before I was bitten.  And yes, I’ve never seen any children who were not bitten, as I was.  I guess… I guess we’re like super mutants.”

“Just because you haven’t seen children does not mean they cannot occur, but I trust your judgement.  Even if your kind are infertile, the powers you possess would be a great asset to the Legion.  Too great an asset to pass up.”

He held out his arm again.  

My stare traveled along his fingers, across his wrist, over his powerful bicep, and up to his face.  “You would ask me to bite you, knowing what will happen?  It will be painful as well, the infection does occasionally take lives.  If we are lucky, the ranger has died from it rather than become as I am.”

His ice blue eyes bored back into my much darker gaze.  “Let me become what you are.”

I opened my mouth and let my face become canine.  My instincts remained in a frenzy, screaming at me to flee as strongly as if someone held a gun to my skull.  Every muscle strained in fight or flight and it took more focus than I’d known I’d had to control my jaws and slowly embrace his wrist in my mouth.  The animal side of me longed to snap my jaws shut with enough force to crush bone and I held it back.  My body physically shook to ease my teeth together as gently as possible.  I waited until I tasted blood and held myself frozen in place for a full minute before I released him and changed back.  

Vulpes rotated his wrist to study the wound.  “Are you sure that worked?”

“We’ll know soon.”  I sat back, panting as I let my jaw relax.  Something rumbled again and this time I ignored it completely.  It was probably just distant thunder.  “Bandage it, but don’t put anything on the wound.  I don’t know if the infection can be counteracted by salves.”

He tore a strip of cloth from a spare shirt and wrapped it around the bite.  We lay down to watch the stars.  It didn’t take long to know that the plague of my nature had taken hold.  

Vulpes had never been the kind of man to fall asleep easily.  When he’d been injured, I’d judged his health from how often and how deeply he slept.  When he was healthy, he would wake if I so much as rolled over and he slept less readily than _I_ did.  I had never seen him doze off unless he was sick except when I had trusted him too little to let myself fall asleep before he had.  That night after I bit him, Vulpes passed out ten minutes after we lay down together.  

And I do mean passed out.  One moment he was watching the stars and the next he collapsed.  I’d seen other people turn many times before, I knew the signs that things were going wrong.  I trusted that he would be fine.  He was young, he was strong, and very healthy.  Those who died were often old or very young.  Vulpes would survive.  Still, I kept silent vigil, curling against him but keeping my eyes open, watching for tremors or any change in his breathing.  It surprised me that he had chosen to do this.  Not that I felt he particularly cared about starting a family, but becoming what I was seemed like a significant step.  Had he only done this through devotion to the Legion cause, or was there a different reason for this choice?  Try as I might, I couldn’t plumb the depths of his decision.  

I could almost convince myself that, despite the worry still nagging at my mind, I was at peace.  I felt that I would watch him through the night, and he would wake, and we would continue exactly as we had for the past few years, but more dangerous, able to take on even greater threats together.  We could take on the NCR ourselves, if we were careful enough about it.  We would serve the Legion together for decades to come, and with our help, the Legion would stretch from sea to shining sea, as the song said.  I had faith in that.  I had no idea how abruptly that faith would be torn apart.  

I heard the rumble again, above us on the canyon around the river.  Rather than dissipating, this time it not only remained but rushed towards us, a charging bull of sound and substance heard but unseen in the night.  I stood to fight but had no time to realize what could not be fought as hundreds of gallons of water surged downhill and swept us into the river. 


	5. Adrift

I don’t know how long I struggled frantically against the raging currents before the river washed me up on a muddy shore.  The flood had pooled in this bend of rock and earth and I found myself among its detritus.  Branches, twigs, and papers littered the muck among the less savory forms of the dead.  Six legionaries, a brahmin, two geckos, and a blind old deathclaw.  I checked the men.  None of them were Vulpes.  He might still be alive, but I knew he wasn’t.  He’d been out cold, he’d gone under before I’d been able to grab him.  He was dead.  

I sat back on my haunches, human in form but canine in posture.  This was my fault.  We could have run.  Why didn’t we run?  I could have convinced him.  Even after that, I should have found him.  I should have gone underwater to find him!  He should be here!

Despair and guilt washed over me like a second flood.  I’d let him die.  

The sun had risen and caked the mud around my thighs before instinct won out over depression and I stood.  Even if the Legion had survived, Vulpes hadn’t, and without him my work under their banner was over.  I’d have to make my own way in this world, as I never had before.  

I was naked.  Mud had dried thickly in my hair, forming a heavy carapace of filth across my back.  I washed in the murky, bloody river, which now ran slowly as if nothing had even happened last night.  My hair held dirt like my mind held all the memories I had made in the past decade.  I took a machete from one of the fallen legionaries and cut it off, trimming it down to a ragged, matted shoulder-length mess.  I took the man’s clothes as well, reveling in the vexillarius hood which so resembled my canine pelt.  It suited me; I felt more animal than man right now.  

I wandered like an abandoned dog, living off the land.  For six days I hunted geckos and drank from wild springs and ponds.  Water became scarce and I could not live on meat alone.  My body drove me towards other food and I strayed into towns and settlements, filching from farms and breaking into homes to raid kitchens.  I was nearly shot in Nipton before I headed north.  I had no destination.  There was no goal left except survival.  Prey would never be scarce for one like myself, but summer took hold and soon I found myself chewing cacti for the slightest drop of water.  My feet sought pavement without conscious thought, following old roads in hope of settlements and wells.  When I saw Novac, I felt surprised that I remained coherent enough to avoid it for fear of the NCR snipers.  I skirted west around the city, scenting for water but finding none.  The heat of the day had burned my throat and dried the blood on my cracked lips, but the ache of my sides and chest remained after the sun set.  I smelled water.  

I ran north into a junk yard, ignoring the growls and barks of the dogs that lived there.  I plunged my face into their water bowls, drinking them all dry and licking them clean.  By this point the dogs had gone into a frenzy, barking as much with fear as with hate.  They did not trust my kind.  I did not care.  Even if they’d had the courage to attack, their teeth posed no threat to me.  A pistol was another matter.  

The barking alerted the dog’s owner and an old woman swung open a door, bathing the yard in lantern light before I fled.  At a dead sprint, I was gone before she could react to my presence.  

That water saved my life.  With nothing better to do, I followed the same road, slipping unseen past civilization and travelers until thirst descended upon me once again, the constant predator of the wasteland.  I’d reached Vegas before it had me in its talons, and though there was water, I had new difficulty in reaching it.  

*         *        *

I met Coyote on a particularly boring Friday.  My research, of course, had been going nowhere, and for a change I left the Wrangler alone, resigned and not expecting to do anything but return to my bunk in the Mormon Fort and get some sleep.  I didn’t gamble or do drugs, and didn’t drink excessively, but I did drink, and for a lot of reasons, I had one other vice.  That other vice, evidently, was not going to happen tonight and I was just a little frustrated by that when I left the Wrangler.  

Between my lab coat and how many people knew me around here, I didn’t expect to be attacked, though I still carried my plasma defender everywhere I went.  I didn’t always stick to the main roads, so that night, bored and a bit restless, I decided to take a walk around town.  It wasn’t unusual for me to do that; I didn’t like the main roads even when they weren’t busy, and I needed a stroll or…something, to get me tired enough to sleep most nights.  I was wandering an alley near Cerulean Robotics when I felt eyes upon me.  

Like I said, I didn’t expect to be attacked, but in Freeside, you never knew, and usually a feeling of being watched foretold imminent robbery.  I drew my plasma defender but didn’t see anything for several moments.  And then my eyes adjusted.  A shape I’d mistaken for a pile of rags in the alley beside me resolved into a human being covered in mud and fresh blood.  I didn’t need to look too closely to recognize both the uniform and iconic hood of a vexillarius, even if this one didn’t have the obnoxious flag on his back.  Crimson cloth and worn leather blended together with layers of grime and a fresh coat of blood to the point that I only knew this was a person because I could see him staring back at me, silent and focused.  I would have shot him on sight if he hadn’t looked to pathetic.  

The legionary snarled, probably trying to speak and slurring too strongly to make himself understood.  He struggled to stand and sagged back onto the concrete, barely keeping his skull from smacking against the wall behind him.  I heard his panting crackle fluid in his lungs.  I couldn’t tell if he looked more angry or desperate.  

The guy was covered in blood, and twenty at the oldest.  I guessed that he was probably eighteen or nineteen and however he might have just cursed me, I didn’t like the idea of killing someone so clearly helpless.  In the dark, I couldn’t see where the blood had come from but I didn’t really expect that someone who looked this beat-up might have been a murderer himself.  He was too young to have seen real combat anyway, this was probably some Legion recruit who had the misfortune to meet a radscorpion in the wasteland, or else maybe he’d gotten lost and found his way here looking for food and water.  

“Are you hurt?”

Like a switch had been flipped, his bravado abated and he watched me with wide-eyed curiosity.  And then suspicion.  “Why?”

I sighed.  “Because honestly, you don’t look like you’re doing very well right now.  I can help.”

His dark eyes flicked over my white coat and lingered on the patch on the right shoulder.  “You’re one of the Followers of the Apocalypse?”

I sighed again.  “Yeah, I am.”  If he even _mentioned_ Caesar…

“You’re a doctor?”

That wasn’t any of the questions I’d expected.  “Yeah.”

The legionary stood up, stumbling and holding onto the wall to keep himself steady.  His fingers clawed at the concrete, the tips leaving blood streaked where they touched it until I thought that he must have torn them open on the rough surface.  He struggled to breathe and spat blood on the ground, standing so stooped that I couldn’t see his figure clearly until he forced himself to straighten his back.  However broken he looked, he had spirit, or some misplaced Legion pride.  

Once he stood completely upright he was only a few inches shorter than me and even though his build was lean and he looked about to die, he stared back at me without the slightest hint of fear.  His face was set, grim and expressionless as if he’d fight me if he had to but he didn’t seem hostile.  His age kept my gun at my side even if his looks might have dome the same thing.  And then I noticed something else.  

However muscular the legionary was and despite the slight curve remaining to his back, no doubt from pain, the leather armor on his chest bulged out just a bit more than it should have.  My eyes widened.  “You’re a woman?”  He had a weirdly high-pitched voice— gravely, but the guy had just coughed up blood and probably had fluid in his lungs from the sound of it.  He _could_ be a woman…

If he was a woman, dressed as a legionary, my mind went straight to escaped slave.  There weren’t many other reasons a woman would dress like one of the Legion, and if she was a slave, she might not have any idea how to behave in any sort of normal society.  

The legionary’s eyes flicked away awkwardly and then returned to my own as caution won out over discomfort.  She said nothing.  

I let down my guard a bit and tried to sound comforting.  “Hey, it’s alright.  If you’re an escaped slave—”

Whatever hostility she’d been lacking came back tenfold.  She practically bristled.  “I am no slave!”  She spoke so forcefully that her voice dropped about three octaves and she began a coughing fit.  She tried to say more and I couldn’t hear her.  

Even in the dark, I could see clearly enough that each cough sprayed blood across the pavement.  She stumbled and started to fall before I caught her.  Legion or no, this woman clearly needed medical help and she was in no position to fend me off.  I got another snarl that was probably profane but she couldn’t stop coughing.  “Come on,” I walked her back towards the Mormon Fort with an arm around her shoulders, a little more annoyed than pitying now, “you can protest all you like, but you clearly won’t live long without help.”  

That seemed to placate her.  She coughed for another half a minute before she shut her mouth and forced it to stop, presumably by sheer willpower.  Her lungs spasmed a few times after she shut her mouth, but they quickly abated.  I felt her holding her breath in the minute or so after she’d quieted herself and realized just in time to catch her as she passed out completely.  Even as tall as she was, and reasonably muscular, I got her to the Fort without too much trouble.  

I had her on a bunk and had just started wiping blood and muck off her face when she opened her eyes again.  In the light of the lantern in the tent, I realized that her irises, which had looked black or very dark brown were actually the darkest shade of blue I’d ever seen.  Her pupils narrowed to dots as soon as she awoke and she scrambled back so quickly that she nearly fell off the bed.  Crouched against the metal headboard, shaking, still bloody, and probably blinded by the bright light, she snarled, coughed, and snapped, “Where am I?  Who are you?  What are you doing to me?”

I’d stayed perfectly still since she’d awakened and only moved now, lowering the cloth I’d been using to wipe her face and sitting back in my chair.  We had plenty of hallucinating junkies and rape victims that I’d gotten very used to dealing with hysterics.  Granted, I wasn’t usually the go-to doctor here, but sooner or later almost everyone had to deal with the patients, we couldn’t exactly avoid them in Freeside, especially in the Fort itself.  

“You’re in the Old Mormon Fort,” I explained slowly and softly, “the Followers’ base in New Vegas.  I’m Arcade Gannon.  I’m just trying to clean the blood off of you so I can see what’s wrong.”

I could see her breathing rapidly even if I hadn’t been able to hear it.  Her eyes adjusted to the light and she seemed to calm down just a little.  She lowered herself into a more comfortable sitting position, still as far away from me as possible in the small tent.  “Water?”

I handed her a bottle.  “It’s purified.”  Looking over the clean part of her face and a new trickle of fresh blood dribbling from her nose, I guessed, “When was the last time you had anything to drink?”  

She hesitated and then shrugged.  She leaned forward just far enough to take the bottle I offered her and retreated to the corner, downing it in a few hurried gulps.  She closed the empty bottle and held it like a treasure, clasping it close to her chest with both hands but otherwise relaxing just a little more.  Her eyes scanned up and down my body, pausing twice on my plasma defender. She was sizing me up.  “Why have you helped me?”

I sighed and grabbed two more bottles of water from the shelf beside me.  “I’m not in the habit of letting bleeding young women die in the streets.”

Caution ignited into another surge of unexpected anger.  “Stop calling me that!”

I stared blankly.  “What?”

“Stop calling me that!”  She leapt off the bunk and tried to stand, maybe even intending to leave the tent, but her nimble hop became a shaky step and she sagged back against the metal support of the top bunk.  Panting stirred fluid in her lungs and she admitted.  “I am a _man_.”

I glanced back over her body.  Her clothes and musculature still masked things a bit, but in the lantern-light there could be no mistaking her biological gender.  “Okay.”

I got up to try and help him back to the bed but stopped at the glare he gave me.  Coming to terms with his inability to leave, the legionary let himself drop back onto the cot, sitting with his legs over the edge, hunched over in pain.  I offered him another bottle of water as I sat down and he took it, not making eye contact with me.  He drank this one more slowly and I had some water from the other bottle I’d grabbed hoping that being marginally less tipsy might help me treat this temperamental legionary without setting off another struggle for the door that could aggravate whatever injuries he had.  

I’d planned to just let him calm down until we both finished our water and by then I’d have hopefully devised a way to diplomatically ask whether or not he really was a fascist murderer, but to my surprise he broke the silence halfway through his second battle of water.  

“Sorry.”  I looked up to see him staring at the liquid, but apparently addressing me.  “I was…on edge.  My name is Coyote.”  

I’d expected something more Latin-sounding, but I wasn’t about to risk what little progress I’d made asking about his name.  If he’d wanted to call himself Shack, I wouldn’t have argued with him.  Right now I was more surprised that he suddenly seemed rational.  

“You were probably in a lot of pain.”

Coyote frowned at me and then nodded.  “Yes.”

I tried my luck and asked directly.  “Are you hurt?”

He gave me such a suspicious stare that I didn’t expect an answer, but then he relented.  “I… No.”

I raised an eyebrow.  “No?  Not that I don’t believe you, but you’re covered in blood.  Are you sick?”

“No.  I don’t get sick.”

Coyote sat up suddenly, distracted by something in the courtyard.  The wind had picked up and the flag turned, chiming the metal fasteners on the rope against the flagpole.  Coyote watched it, totally mesmerized.  His face took on a gleam of child-like interest.  Focused on the flag pole in the courtyard, he didn’t look my way to see the questioning frown I gave him.  “ _Riiight._   I’m not saying I don’t believe you, but I’d like to run a few tests, just to be sure you’re really a mutant.”  

The clearly-not-mutant enigma answered flatly, “If you want.”  Evidently, he didn’t understand sarcasm, or he just wasn’t paying attention.  My blank stare became a genuine, if somewhat skeptical grin.  He clearly had issues, and he might well have killed someone, but the peaceful curiosity he exhibited right now made it hard for me not to like him.  

He looked so completely calm that I moved to sit on the bed beside him.  

Instantly that ease vanished, replaced by a tension that extended to every fiber of his body.  He tried to stand and managed it this time; he stepped into the center of the tent.  I raised my palms very slowly.  “I’m not going to hurt you, I just want to make sure you’re okay.”

He almost snarled his answer.  “I’m fine!”  The flash of anger clearly masked fear and he regretted it.  I started to speak, trying to calm him down as he glanced from the cot to the door, too uncomfortable to make eye contact.  Before I could try to stop him, Coyote turned and fled.  He’d left the Fort before I even got out of the tent and I fully expected that I’d never see him again after that.  I stopped in the open flap of the tent and sighed, staring towards the closing gate of the fort.  Beatrix walked over and followed my gaze.  

“That’s why you need to check your knots.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yeaaah... I'm writing Arcade as a slut, more or less. >_> I could see him acting like that, considering you can recruit him by flirting and all.


	6. While You See A Chance, Take It

For three weeks, things seemed to go back to normal.  The NCR became a little more present in the area and unrest that had always been prevalent in Freeside, or at least since I’d moved here, escalated until it was almost hostility.  I expected many more muggings, but that sort of violence declined.  People were still getting beat up and fights were starting, but hardly any of them had been robbed and most fights involved people who knew each other or those who had obvious allegiance to the NCR or Freeside.  I didn’t realize why the muggings had declined until I overheard a conversation one night at the Wrangler.  

“You heard those old tribal stories about woof-men?”

James sighed at the drunk.  “Tony, you’re not gonna convince me to give you another bottle until you have the caps for it.  I don’t care what story you spin.”

“No,” Tony insisted, “I mean it!  I _seen_ it!  There’s one of ‘em in Freeside!  Ya gotta believe me!” In the crowded bar two patrons gave Tony’s shouting a mildly curious glance and Garrett took this as a disturbance of the peace.  

“Tony, quiet down, you’re scaring people.”

Tony was adamant.  “But I _seen_ it!”  He started to gesture wildly, empty whisky bottle forgotten.  “You _know_ the thugs have been runnin’ off lately, it’s cause of _him_!”

“Tony, have you been hitting the chems again?”

“No,” Tony insisted, “I been clean, I swear!  It’s the woof-man!”

Despite the fact that he couldn’t say wolf and probably had no idea what a wolf had really been, it was clear enough what he meant.  I set down my rum-and-nuka and frowned at him.  “Is there any chance this `wolf-man’ might be someone wearing a vexillarius hood?”

Tony shook his head so fervently that James covered a drink he was preparing to keep the drunk from shedding hair and dirt into it.  “No!  I’m sayin’ ya, it was a woof-man!  I _seen_ him!  He stood tall as a deathclaw!”  He raised a hand as far as he could reach to demonstrate and then lowered his fingers to mimic fangs, “He had teef like…like those really big knives!”

“Machetes?”

Tony nodded vigorously, “Yeah!  Yeah, machetes!  But _black_!  And his eyes!”  He held his fingers to make circle shapes around his eyes, “His eyes were like big holes right through his head!”

I nodded.  “Like a vexillarius hood.”

Tony smacked the table.  “It weren’t no vex-silly-ass!  I _tellin_ ’ ya!  I _seen_ it!”  He held his fingers up to the sides of his head and wiggled them around like horns.  “It had _ears_!  Like… like huge pointed things sticking up off its head!”

Both of us, and most of the room, just stared at him blankly and Tony smacked the bar again.  

“Ya don’t _believe_ me?!”  He got up and continued prophesying doom.  “The woof-man gon’ kill us all!”  His speech devolved into curses and unintelligible slurs and the bouncers moved in to haul him out to the street.  Garrett eyed me as if he expected me to run out after him to hunt the thing down.  

“What?”

“You aren’t going to do anything about that?  I mean, I don’t like the Legion myself, but _you_ , you’re…”

“Strongly committed to morality?”

“Well… yeah.”

I shrugged and stared at my drink, trying to determine if and why Coyote would have stayed in Freeside.  If he was clearing out the worst residents, that seemed like a noble goal, unless he was only doing it for love of killing.  “I met someone in a vexillarius uniform around a month ago, but I thought they’d moved on by now.”

“And you didn’t kill him?”  Garrett chuckled and poured one of the bouncers a drink.  “You really go for the bad boys, don’t you?”

I snorted.  “Shut up.”

He laughed again and rested his hands on the bar.  “Seriously, though.  You met a legionary and he’s not dead?  What happened?”

“I’m not sure he _is_ a legionary.  He was half dead when I met him.”

“And that played to your need to save everyone and everything.”  I scowled at him and he amended, “Not that that’s a _bad_ thing.”

“I’m not positive it was a good thing, in this case.”

The rest of that night went as most of my nights did, with no further mention of Coyote or the changing atmosphere of the city.  Most people came to the Wrangler to forget that sort of thing, and to some degree so did I.  Even with less thugs beating people up for their money, Freeside remained an unhappy place.  

I returned to my bunk a few hours before dawn, exhausted and somewhere between content and resigned.  I flopped into bed without looking around and so I didn’t notice anything until morning.  

I never liked mornings.  I opened my eyes and stared at the unoccupied bunk above me for a long time, letting the sunlight slowly drive off the vestiges of sleep.  Another day of trying to turn plants into stimpaks.  Splendid.  

I rolled onto my side before I sat up, letting my back settle into a different and slightly less comfortable position and flexing my hand, which had been wedged between my mattress and the metal frame of the bunk when I’d awakened.  As grogginess ebbed to the standard grouchy morning mood, I noticed a large metal crate under the table in the corner of my tent.  I’d never seen that before and as this tent only housed myself with the very rare addition of visiting scientists and patients who had no room to sleep elsewhere, I couldn’t think of any reason it would be here and not in storage.  I sat up and hauled the box closer to take a look at it.  

A note on the lid, written on very old yellowed paper, read simply, “Sorry.  Thank you so much.”  There was no other text, no signature, no recipient, although presumably it had been meant for me.  Julie must have put it under the table when it arrived, I’d have to ask if she knew who’d sent it.  The note left me with a million questions, not the least being who had sent it because few people aside from other Followers could read and write.  The note had been written in neat penmanship so basic that I almost mistook it for type.  Opening the box, I guessed why.  

The crate had been filled to the brim with books, fifty-two in total, including books of sheet music, scientific and medical texts, and ten fiction stories from Jules Verne to Jane Austen.  Fifty of them were old world, so intact that they must have been scavenged from vaults or other places where they might have remained pristine.  The other two were much newer and handwritten in the same no-frills print.  The first had clearly been stitched together from loose sheets of paper and a leather binding; it held a few dozen songs, written both as lyrics and notes.  They were a wide mix, and only one credited a singer, probably because that was the only one the author knew for certain.  That one was an Elvis song, “Can’t Help Falling in Love.”  Considering that the other songs ranged from the Star Spangled Banner to folk songs and church hymns, I didn’t assign it particular meaning.  The other book looked like a blank encyclopedia, or else it had been crafted much more expertly than the smaller volume.  The cover had been decorated with fresh leather binding and what seemed to be a brass frame along the edges.  Inside, that book the writer had detailed the life of the wasteland, as they knew it, ranging from animals to plants.  It was the most detailed biology text I’d ever read.  The book totaled over two thousand pages, making it a massive cinder block of a tome.  Clearly the author knew animals better than plants.  The first few trees and flowers had a page to themselves but it rapidly changed to two or three species a page.  Every entry had a picture, albeit a very crude one.  Barrel cacti showed a circle with lines to represent the needles, but the written description could not have been more accurate or detailed.  Some plants noted qualities like “poisonous” or “healing properties” but the wasteland encyclopedia really shone when it got to animals.  I hadn’t realized that anyone would ever study the migration patterns of bighorner herds or the diseases common in yao guai.  Animal illustrations remained as crude as those for plants— clearly this person was no artist— but the written descriptions became even more detailed and described the behavior, habitat, health problems, uses, and even footprints of everything I’d heard of in the wasteland and ever some species I hadn’t.  The text included cyberdogs and a few kinds of robots, evidently the author wasn’t sure what to call them, though they did note that such things “didn’t appear to eat or perform other vital functions.”  He didn’t know what most robots were called either, resulting in names like “air-octopus” and “missile-knight.”  Despite those few inaccuracies, the book had to be the most extensive guide on wasteland flora and fauna that had ever been written.  

I stowed the books back under the table and went to ask Julie who’d sent them.  She looked chipper, as always.  She stood in the center of the fort, waiting for a new shipment of supplies, no doubt, and seemingly oblivious to the early hour.  

“Hey, do you know who dropped off that crate of books?”

She stared at me, her expression instantly conveying her complete ignorance that the crate even existed.  “What crate of books?

I sighed.  “There was a crate of books in my tent.  Mostly old-world texts, sheet music, and fiction novels, but there was also a hand-written thing of sheet music and some sort of wasteland encyclopedia.”  She rushed over to see it as if I’d just told her it held chocolate.  

Rifling through the books like she was examining a chest of gold, she asked rapidly, “Do you have any idea who might have sent these?  Where did they find such intact volumes?  Would you be willing to donate them to the Followers?  You don’t have to, we can have them copied, of course.”  She found the note and frowned at it for a disproportionally long time considering the length of the message.  “Thank you and sorry.  For what?  Arcade, does this mean anything to you?”  

I shrugged.  As far as I knew, only a handful of my friends could write and none of them had reason to apologize or thank me, let alone send crates of books and risk all our cover.  “I have no idea.”  I considered the books.  “I would like to keep some of them and ideally read the others, now that I think about it.”

Julie considered the box.  “It seems like they were gifted to you specifically.  I’d like to make copies, but of course you can keep the books after that.  I’ll ask the guards if they saw anyone, but I don’t think they noticed, or they would have said something.”

As it turned out, no one had seen anything unusual in the Fort since Beatrix had watched the possible Legionary flee my tent.

*         *         *

I was so used to having a mission that the lack of direction in my life at that time left me driven to fixate on any tasks I could find with undue compulsion.  I spent two weeks scouring vaults for a total of fifty books, the most pristine copies I could find, and feeling that even those were not sufficient, I wrote down every song I could remember and spent a full week piecing together a book detailing every fact I knew or could learn about the wasteland.  Three weeks and one night to deliver my gift of thanks and apology and I had cleverly completed the only task I had for myself.  

Once I spent more time in Freeside, I learned that I could hunt and scavenge and earn enough selling even one good find to keep myself supplied with water.  I caught brahmin and bighorners and dragged them back, feeding the whole of Freeside in the course of feeding myself.  I found myself more hungry than I had been in years, a symptom I attributed to the loss of the only purpose I had felt that I had for most of my life.  

For nearly a decade, I had been a dog of the Legion.  That had been my job and my identity, a simple label to tell me everything I should be in life.  I knew my goals, to expand the Legion.  I knew my limits, the limits of the Legion and of an individual soldier, albeit a particularly dangerous one.  I knew my daily tasks as Vulpes explained his missions to me.  Everything about my life and myself had been clearly defined and structured.  Now that structure was gone.  

Before I reached Vegas, I’d simply survived.  Existential and identity crises became irrelevant and the search for food and water occupied all my time.  After I’d arrived, I began to realize that I was still human.  I put off the debate for three weeks and obsessed over the books, but after that I ran out of excuses.  Who was I?  I could no longer pretend that I truly agreed with the Legion, or pretend that their inescapable reach really controlled me.  I was my own man, as free as anyone could be in this world.  I never expected that I would stay in one place, but I could no longer see any reason to leave.  Maybe this city could become my home.  And I don’t think that the kind doctor was my only reason for that decision.  

Left mostly to my own devices, I could gather enough food or junk to buy my survival within only an hour or two a day.  With so much free time I scouted and scrutinized the area.  I hiked the mountains to the North and wandered east to watch deathclaws in the rail yard.  They could be downright majestic and the beauty of nature, in any form, had always captivated me.  Watching them and remembering what I had read in my youth, I began to accept that maybe I didn’t need a reason.  Life was life, and that was beautiful.  I came to terms with myself as best as I could, accepting and finding who I was a little more each day.  I could be dangerous.  I could be peaceful.  I was a man.  

I found another set of clothes that I wore around town, avoiding the stigma of my Legion attire, though I still wore the hood and even donned the armor at night.  I had spent so long covered in filth when I’d almost lost everything I was that I made a point of staying clean.  I bathed and washed my clothes so obsessively that the colors faded and I earned a reputation for wearing the cleanest white clothes of anyone in Freeside.  I introduced myself as Coyote, but I earned a name as Skye.  Traders asked what my secret was and I refused to say.  I wouldn’t admit that I had taken to cleaning as a way of coping with my emotional crises.  

I wanted to talk to Arcade again even before I delivered the books, and I had hoped to give him the crate in person, but I hadn’t been able to.  I still didn’t know how to act around people and I found myself snarling and reaching for my machete whenever anyone approached me unexpectedly.  I stuck to the alleys, keeping my hood off and looking almost normal during the day.  With a strip of cloth binding my chest, I passed well enough as a man and most of the few people who began to recognize me were too drunk to see otherwise.  I avoided the Fort and without the hood, I didn’t expect that Arcade would realize who I was even if he caught sight of me by day.  At night I dressed as I had when he had seen me, using the armor and hood to terrify those who might seek to make this neighborhood more dangerous.  Even those drunks who called me a friend by day fled if they saw me at night.  

Hauling animal carcasses and scavenged clothes and weapons, I became known as an eccentric trader.  People noted my guarded nature, serious expression, and near hostility and I’m sure more than one realized that I had a military background, despite my age.  I still found it difficult to relax, but I tried.  I managed not to attack the drunks who tried to pat me on the back or shake my hand for supplying food to the area, and I came to accept the Elvis impersonators who began to take note of my presence and thank me.  

This relative acceptance was not the same way I felt towards Arcade.  I knew that he had saved my life even if he did not realize it, and I had all but attacked him.  I hated that I had ever gotten so paranoid and aggressive to repay kindness with rage, and I desperately wanted to make it up to him.  The trouble was, after such a horrible first meeting, I couldn’t work up the courage to even go near him for weeks.  I’d planned to deliver my apology in person, but backed down when the time had come to do so.  I’d fought rangers unarmed, I’d charged in to deal with swarms of cazadors, how was it possible that one man could make me so terrified?  

Given my past exploits and my general discomfort with being social, I cultivated an already well-developed ability to stay unseen and as a result I spotted the doctor more than once, carrying out daily routines or walking through town while I relaxed on rooftops or rested in alleyways.  The man never knew I was there and I was always too nervous to correct him, even when some of these showed me more about him than I would have liked.  I looked away rather than reveal my presence.  Even though I did not plan to spy, my skills let me pick up information without trying.  In less than a month, I knew almost every detail about the lives of every Freeside resident, from the child, Max, who possessed a weapon much more powerful than he realized, to the King himself.  I watched the town like an old world ant farm, analyzing every detail simply out of habit and marveling at the intricate nature of life.  I ran off thugs, but didn’t interfere with anyone else until one night five days after I’d delivered the books.  

*      *       *

My feet carried me back from the Wrangler to the Fort without any conscious guidance.  Things had gone as they usually did and it was after midnight and I was exhausted.  The only way in which this walk differed from all the similar walks that week was that, in what had been an unseasonably warm evening, I’d left my lab coat in my tent.  I’d left the Wrangler a little more rumpled and about as drunk as usual.  I was by no means incapacitated, but my path meandered the alleys a lot less directly than it would have if I’d been sober.  Half my shirt remained tucked into my pants, but the rest hung loose and I’d left the top few buttons unbuttoned.  I guess, all in all, I really looked like just another drunk wandering the streets tonight.  

Of course, I didn’t realize that at the time, not that it would have changed my actions.  I heard shouting and turned towards it.  Three NCR soldiers had Santiago on the ground and as I watched, two of them kicked the screaming man.  

“Hey!”  The whiny shock of my initial outburst abated and I cleared my throat to yell, “Hey, leave him alone!”  I had my plasma defender drawn, but even with its glow in the dim light, the first soldier didn’t notice.  

“This isn’t any of your business, get lost!”

Their commanding officer, on the other hand, realized I was armed.  “Corporal!”

I hadn’t planned to shoot then unless they kept beating him up.  Santiago could quite readily provoke a beating and even though he didn’t deserve anything too serious, I didn’t want to start a war over a guy who’d probably brought this on himself.  If they left him alive, I could let them go and patch him up without igniting the powder keg that NCR-Vegas relations had become.  The soldiers didn’t give me that opportunity.  

The first bullet nicked the concrete behind me and I ducked behind a dumpster for cover.  The two corporals opened fire wildly, wasting a large portion of their ammo against the dumpster and not doing anything but making the metal hum.  The officer, whatever he was, waited more patiently.  That would have kept me pinned and unable to fire until, inevitably, they closed in or called for reinforcements and I’d probably get shot.  Unfortunately for him, his patience didn’t matter.  

The soldiers stood below a ruined building.  They all focused on me, thinking, quite rightly, that Santiago was too terrified to interfere and not expecting anyone to help us in this dangerous area.  They were wrong.  Glancing around the dumpster, I saw a dark shape drop from the roof to land heavily between the three soldiers.  He stood but didn’t have a chance to act as the officer spun towards him and started to bark an order before I stood and shot him.  The plasma liquified him.  

I don’t know if it was due to seeing their commander melt or fear of the dark and very recognizable vexillarius suddenly standing beside them, but one corporal screamed and the other simply fled in terror.  Coyote took care of the remaining soldier before he could come to his senses and shoot.  His machete cleanly decapitated the man in one effortless swing.  Santiago blubbered and scrambled backwards as the bloody corpse dropped at his feet.  It took the usually smooth-talker several minutes to regain coherence.  

I walked over to Coyote.  

He’d cleaned himself up since we’d last met.  The fur of his hood gleamed even in the low light and his awful Legion armor seemed brand new.  I’d approached him half because I was afraid that he might kill Santiago for one reason or another, but when I got closer I saw that his wary scowl had been replaced by a smile that looked almost relaxed.  His eyes flicked about and he still seemed reluctant to make direct eye contact, but that smile showed a level of ease I hadn’t expected from him.  I didn’t miss the fact that his gaze took in my disheveled appearance even though he said nothing.  I felt just a little uncomfortable about that.  

“Hey.”

“Hey.”  His voice had changed so dramatically that I had to look at the blue of his eyes to make sure he was really the same person.  He went from a high-pitched and almost robotic tone to a smooth baritone that sounded less intimidating and more… seductive.  It certainly didn’t sound like the sort of voice genetically possible for a woman.  He was changing his voice intentionally, he had to be.  

Santiago got to his feet while Coyote and I shared an awkward stare.  Dusting himself off and fixing his tie, the perpetual optimist took one careful look at his savior and held out his hand.  “Santiago thanks you for saving his life.  Is there anything I can do for you, my…”  Even beaten and bloody, the guy made every effort to flirt and flatter.  He was one of the only men in town I avoided sleeping with, mostly because his Santiago act just got annoying, and my frown clearly showed that he’d be wise to take what he could get and leave before he annoyed his ex-Legion savior.  Coyote might not have attacked me, but I didn’t put it past the young man to kill Santiago at a moment’s notice, however benign he’d looked only a second ago.  Santiago trailed off, possibly because he’d noticed the iconic Legion attire of his savior and possibly because Coyote, whose hood hid his face from me when he looked at Santiago, gave him that lethal stare he’d given me when we’d first met.  Santiago’s voice died in his throat.  

“I thank you again for my life, sir, now I’ll leave you to your business.”  He nodded in what was almost a bow and fled as fast as his bruised legs could carry him.  I’d have to track him down later and make sure he was okay.  Hopefully he’d be grateful enough to shut up.  

Coyote turned back to me, beaming innocently.  “Hey.”

“Hey.  Didn’t we just have this exchange?”

He laughed nervously and apologized.  “Sorry.”

“It’s fine.”  We both fell silent for several seconds.  “You aren’t very used to people, are you?”  

He shook his head, flapping the ears of his hood and making me cringe at the jarring juxtaposition of his Legion attire and his innocent appearance.  

“Do you have any _other_ clothes?  You know, clothes that _aren’t_ a Legion uniform?”

Coyote nodded, blatantly failing to realize why I’d asked.  

“Can you change into those?  And not just because you might get shot advertising Legion loyalty around here,” his apparent calm drove me to risk a possibly incendiary statement, “but also because I’m honestly not a fan of the Legion.”

He nodded again.  “Okay.”  I don’t know what reaction I’d expected, but it certainly wasn’t a happy and accommodating “okay.”  He started off towards the edge of Freeside and gestured for me to follow.  

“Coyote… Are you still loyal to the Legion?”

He shrugged.  More than his voice had changed.  As guarded as he had been before, he was completely open right now.  He still seemed tense, but I attributed that to the sort of nerves that came with being on the run.  I knew the feeling well, even if I hadn’t felt _really_ threatened in years.  The NCR wasn’t looking for me out here, and they had too much on their plate from the Legion, the Fiends, and the Khans to worry about me right now.  Coyote, on the other hand, should be more careful.  

“I never agreed with them, it was more of… a necessity.  The Legion was the way things were, and I didn’t realize that could change.  I wear this uniform because its armor, and it usually terrifies the thugs I ambush.”

Well, that made sense.  “It scares thugs, but it also makes you a target.  If you earn too much of a reputation in that get-up, the NCR might come after you intentionally.”

“I can handle them.”

He said that so casually.  “Are you sure?”  That was my diplomatic way of calling bullshit.  He paused in an alley by the old train station and put his hands in pockets I hadn’t known he had to turn and look at me.  I couldn’t read the emotion in his frown.

“Why?  Are you worried about me?”

“I just don’t like watching people I know get themselves killed.”

His smile faltered a little, but I couldn’t tell why.  “I’m not going to get myself killed.”  He resumed walking and I followed him.  

When it became clear that he didn’t know what else to say, I asked, “What are you doing here?”  I realized how that could sound hostile and amended, “I mean, what are you trying to do?  Are you just cleaning up the streets…?”

“Kind of.”  He turned suddenly, opening a door I hadn’t noticed amid a heap of junk and debris.  Inside, a room in an old ruin had been refurbished and decorated, the ceiling reinforced with wood and steel, hides and rugs thrown on the floor, and blankets set up as curtains to make rooms.  The whole dwelling couldn’t have been more than twice the size of my tent, but he’d made it weirdly cozy.  The rugs and blankets stuck to a color scheme, even if it was red and gold and he turned on a small lantern that lit the place with a warm orange light.  A few reasonably intact wooden boxes separated his possessions into several categories: clothes, weapons, food, books, and a few miscellaneous trinkets.  He had one other outfit, faded nearly to white, and he picked it up as he stepped in the door.  Coyote gestured around vaguely, “You can sit down, if you want, or… whatever.”

I saw his point, he didn’t have any chairs.  There was a sort of nest in the middle of the room, a mix of hides and blankets that probably served as his bed, but he had no other furniture except the boxes.  I closed the door and stood awkwardly beside it as he stepped behind a curtain to change.  

“I’m driving the thugs away,” Coyote explained, “I haven’t really thought beyond that.”

I did my best to nudge him in the right direction.  “You could help fight the Legion, you know…”

He snorted.  “With who?”  The grim humor abated from his voice as did his cheerful tone and for a moment I heard an utterly defeated man.  “The NCR would execute me as surely as the Legion would, if I got myself involved, or worse.  And I can’t fight the Legion.”

“But you can take down the NCR singlehandedly?”

I heard him buckle his belt and he stepped back into view.  In faded jeans and a white shirt that practically glowed, he looked like a different man, and not just because his face had now taken on a somber countenance.  His hair was short, thick, and black.  He’d slicked it back, but it still looked bedraggled.  He wore sandals he seemed to have made himself.  He must have bound his breasts  because he looked completely male despite the thin fabric of his shirt.  “I can’t fight either army singlehandedly.  I don’t plan to provoke the NCR, but I can handle myself.  I’ll be careful.”  He must have picked up on my unspoken doubt because he snapped.  “I am not helpless.  I’ve fought rangers more than once, and not with an army or even a full unit at my back.”

His anger abated and he looked around.  “I really need to get some chairs.”

“Yeah, you do.”  

I’d expected him to just change the subject, but he continued talking about the Legion and NCR.  “I know you don’t like the Legion.  Most people around here don’t like us… them, but they raised me.  For a long time, the Legion was the only life I knew.  I don’t agree with them, but I can’t just turn against them.  I hope you can understand that.”  

I could understand that a lot better than he realized.  I nodded reluctantly.  “What did you do for the Legion?”  If he’d fought rangers, he was no slave.  Either he’d been able to pass as a man, or he’d had someone helping him keep his secret, probably both.  

Coyote gave the chilling answer with flat honesty.  “I was a frumentarius assisting and accompanying Vulpes Inculta.”

I stared at him.  That only surprised me a little, it made sense that he must have been in a small group and frumentari were the most likely branch for that to happen, but he was so young, I couldn’t believe he’d been working directly with Inculta.  Again, he seemed to realize my doubt.  Coyote gave me a long and thoughtful stare and explained.  “He was my age, or close to it.  And I wasn’t officially assigned to work with him, anyway.  It just happened.  We were both very good at what we did.”

I wanted to dismiss that as a lie, but it rang true.  The NCR only showed one picture of Inculta, and with his clothing it became difficult to determine his exact age.  He might have been a teenager when it was taken.  They wouldn’t want anyone to see him as a child.  “How long ago…?”  I swallowed that question and rephrased it.  “How old are Legion soldiers when they first see battle?”

Coyote shrugged.  “I haven’t often seen the standard units in combat.  Recruits usually aren’t sent where we went.  Mostly we tracked down rangers, surveyed NCR activity, or sabotaged their operations.  But I’ve seen men as young as twelve sent ahead as scouts.”  

I froze to stare at him.  “… _twelve_ …”

Coyote nodded and shrugged awkwardly.  He paced the rug by the door.  “Were you headed somewhere?”

I let him change the subject.  “Yeah.  Home.”

“The Old Mormon Fort?”

I nodded.

“You’re at the Wrangler most nights, right?”

“Is there anywhere else to go after work around here?”

He nodded, conceding that point.  “I’ll stop by sometime.  Not in uniform.”

“Thanks for that.”

I left his tiny home, making note of where it was so maybe I could stop by if he ever vanished for weeks on end or if the NCR really started looking for him.  

*        *         *

I hadn’t gone into the Wrangler before I attacked the NCR soldiers.  Afterwards, I met Arcade there almost every night.  Even before he’d helped me and before I’d recognized the insignia on his lab coat, I’d felt inexplicably comforted by him.  It took me weeks to figure out why, but meeting him in the bar I finally put it together.  He smelled like the old world.  There was something about him, some oil or fuel, presumably, that reminded me of the bunker in the mountains where Vulpes and I had found sanctuary.  I’d known I could trust him even before he’d proved it.  I wanted to be with him whenever possible.  I didn’t know if we could be the way I had been with Vulpes, a near-fearless duo roaming the wastes, and I didn’t really expect that.  He had allegiance to the Followers and after the Legion I felt reluctant to tie myself to any group, even one so educated.  I hoped that they were on the right track and he wouldn’t regret finding family with them, even if the Followers seemed less like family to him than the Legion had been family to me, and that was really saying something.  If either of us had ever been family to the groups we called ourselves a part of, it was only the dysfunctional sort.  

I started going to the Wrangler in the early afternoon every day, as soon as I’d cleaned and hunted and spent a few hours out in the open wasteland.  James got to know that I’d only drink water, but I seemed to attract new customers interested in making me uncomfortable, so he didn’t mind.  For my part, I learned to handle them gracefully, making it clear that I wasn’t interested without needing to start a fight.  Even the really drunk ones backed off when I glared at them, and I could usually drive off unwanted admirers without breaking my smile.  I didn’t mind it.  None of them saw through my clothes and they all treated me as a man.  Whatever their intentions, however depraved they may have been, I didn’t mind.  I took it as a compliment, I was glad they saw me as a man, however they reacted to it.  It didn’t even annoy me.  

For nearly a month, I met Arcade every evening and we talked.  It wasn’t always about the big things, the NCR, the Legion, Mr. House and Vegas and its problems, but there wasn’t too much else to talk about.  He didn’t discuss work and he never asked what I did for the rest of the day.  I guess he just figured I was nocturnal.  We’d talk and eat dinner and most nights, until some time around nine or ten when the workers and traders here to drink thinned out and those interested in gambling, entertainment, and sex became the main patrons.  At that point, we’d usually stopped talking because I couldn’t think of anything to say and I was just happy to be here sitting at the bar beside him and also because, I guess, he just didn’t feel like saying anything.  I can’t blame him for thinking that meant I didn’t care if he left, and I wasn’t going to stop him but sooner or later almost every night, some guy would drop by our table and he would leave with him.  Arcade was nice about it.  For nearly a week, he’d ask if I was okay with that and I didn’t have the heart not to agree.  Afterwards, when they came by, he’d just say good night and tell me he’d see me tomorrow.  I knew it didn’t mean much to him, and I knew I couldn’t exactly contend, physically speaking.  I wasn’t about to deny him that comfort, the wasteland being what it was, and I hadn’t even told him how I felt, so the point was moot.  It still hurt, watching him leave with different men almost every night and knowing what it meant.  James and Francine both seemed to pick up on this, though usually only the former was out when Arcade left.  Whichever twin happened to be working, they gave me a new drink most nights when that happened; I think I must have looked dour or depressed and they probably thought that was bad for business.  They knew I didn’t drink booze, so the drinks were water with crushed herbs or coffee.  The former was a concoction of my own design that hadn’t really caught on, I’d been aiming to make tea and it was more like leafy-water.  I was glad to have either, even if it didn’t cheer me up very much.  I appreciated the fact that they cared enough to do that, even if they probably cared more about their business.  

That had been our routine for several weeks with no mention of the books I’d given him until one day Arcade walked in reading one.  Pride and Prejudice, as it happened.  He _would_ like Jane Austen, wouldn’t he?

I grinned as he came over to the bar, book in hand, and sat down.  “How is it?”

“Good.”  He frowned at me, probably because my grin must have strayed from content to stupidly happy.  “Do you…  I never asked, but, can you read?”

It had never occurred to him.  I was almost offended that he presumed that everyone in the Legion was illiterate, but it was true enough.  I nodded.  “And write.  I grew up in a library.”

“Oh.”  I let the shock sink in and instead he realized something and gave me another, almost suspicious frown.  “You weren’t by any chance the mystery gifter of these books, were you?”

I chuckled and nodded again.  “Do you like them?”

I got another curious stare, trying, apparently in vain to decipher my emotions.  “Yeah, thanks.  Did you write that encyclopedia of the wasteland from your own knowledge or—?”

“I’ve traveled around the wasteland for years.  I checked a few things, but mostly it’s written from my own observations.”

“Huh.”  He thought for a moment and then asked, “How did you know where to leave the crate?”

I grimaced, I’d been afraid he would ask that.  I’d spent too much time as a spy not to notice details that some might consider private, simply in passing, and even putting that aside, I could track everyone in town by scent, which he probably wouldn’t believe.  “I knew you had to sleep in one of the tents in the Fort, and I saw blonde hairs on that bed, so…”

He frowned a little, but I guess he decided not to point out that his hairs were probably in every bed in Freeside, or at least the bed of every man.  He didn’t mention the books again, but I saw him reading some of the times I glimpsed him on my ways in and out of town, and he brought a different book with him to the Wrangler every day for most of the next week.  I knew something was wrong when I saw that he wasn’t reading one day.  He seemed frustrated, maybe upset.  I picked up on his mood before we met at the Wrangler, so I bought a few things to try and help.  I got there early, to make sure I’d be waiting for him.  The place was nearly empty when I arrived, as usual, but it wasn’t quiet.  There was a stranger playing Blackjack in the back, probably some courier or caravan guard.  The guy had a crowd riled up behind him, I guess he was on a winning streak, but I didn’t just avoid the bigger casinos to steer clear of the NCR; the loud cheering annoyed me.  I tried to ignore the gambling and hide my own bad mood when Arcade arrived.  

“Hey.”  I smiled at him.  James knew neither of us changed our orders almost ever, and so did I, so when Arcade sat down, the taller Garrett set our drinks in front of us, a water and a rum-and-nuka, both with tiny paper umbrellas, one red, one blue.  Arcade frowned at them and then looked from me to James.  

James gestured my way.  “His idea.”

Arcade’s grim stare broke into a weary grin as he looked at me.  “You felt like making things a bit more tropical around here?”

I shrugged cheerfully.  “A bit happier, is all.”

He sighed, eyed me like he wanted to say something and then thought better of it.  He sipped his drink instead.  

“What is it?”

Arcade frowned and repeated the process.  Finally, he folded his hands thoughtfully and asked, “You don’t hear much news about the war, do you?”

I considered.  “I don’t.”  I didn’t ask questions I’d rather not hear answered.  The Legion was going to win, and I couldn’t decide where that would leave me.  I couldn’t decide a lot of things right now.  People didn’t tell me about the war, or talk to me much at all; I hardly spoke to anyone but Arcade.  Between the way I had acted when I’d first arrived and the rumors of my Legion loyalties, I wasn’t surprised.  

He sighed again and hesitated.  “The Legion burned Nipton and killed everyone in the town.  It’s farther west than they’ve ever been.”  

It wasn’t, but I didn’t have the heart to correct him.  I just nodded.  “At least they haven’t gotten to Vegas.”

His laugh had more sorrow than humor.  “Says the frumentarius living in Freeside.”

“ _Ex_ -frumentarius.”  

He shook his head and hunched over the bar, leaning on his elbows.  At the tables, cheering broke out; the stranger must have won again.  Arcade ignored it.  “I never even _liked_ Nipton, the place was vile and way too motivated by greed—”

“Says the doctor living in Vegas.”  I grinned, still trying to cheer him up and failing this time.  

He kept scowling at the wood of the bar.  “I’m just not overjoyed to hear that the Legion is that far west.  The NCR really needs help or we’re all going to end up…”  

He trailed off and I rested a hand on his arm, summoning confidence I didn’t really have.  “It’ll be fine.  I’m sure we can figure something out.”  

He gave me that analytic stare again, as usual, and I couldn’t tell if he was trying to determine whether I meant “we” as friends or “we” as lovers, or if he was just wondering how I expected things to be fine.  Even if he’d been debating the former, he asked the latter.  “Do you mean `things will be fine, the NCR will win’, or `things will be fine, I’ll buy you when the Legion makes you a slave?”

“Either.” I answered jokingly, but sobered up at the look he was giving me.  “Look, I can’t fight the Legion, and I can’t help the NCR.  I already explained this.  I don’t know if you can, and honestly, I don’t think either of us would be able to change the course of things.  Que sera sera.”  

He’d seemed almost angry, but now his mood drifted more towards concerned.  

“Do you really expect the Legion to win?”

I shrugged.  “For a long time, I didn’t see any alternative.  I have no idea what I’ll do if the Legion takes the dam, and I have just as few plans for the alternative.  Hell, I don’t even know what I’m doing on a day to day basis, aside from meeting you here.  Planning _that_ far ahead is tricky enough.”

I got another weird stare for that statement.  He fell silent to study the patterns in the wood grain and sip his drink.  

“If you’d want,” I murmured, hesitating, keeping my voice so low it was barely audible over the cheering, “if things go bad… I have half a mind to head north.  Go up into the mountains.  Maybe work my way east, beyond the reach of the Legion, if there is such a thing.”

He choked on his drink and sat back in horror.  “How far east does Legion territory extend?”

I shrugged.  “Texas?  I don’t know.  I’ve barely crossed the Colorado.”

He breathed a sigh of relief.  “Good.  The idea that the Legion might control all the way to Florida was a bit too much for me today.”

He finished his drink and studied the wood grain again, giving me the idea I needed to change the subject while Garrett refilled the glass.  

“I think it’s real oak.”

“Hmm?”

“The bar.”  I traced a set of initials with my fingertip.  “It’s oak.  Really old stuff, too, and people carved things into it.”

That seemed to distract him a bit.  He looked over the polished and ancient surface.  “There are dates.”  He pointed.  “1934, 1956, 1984, 2034, 20… 2077.”  He paused and I stared at him blankly, no idea why his face fell when he read that date.  He sighed and looked around the wood.  “There’s nothing recent.  It might be petrified with age, or radiation, or something.”

Garrett frowned at the bar.  “No idea.  It’s old as fuck, though.  I tried to carve my name in the thing, and the knife broke.”

I smiled.  “Arcade, how long do you think this’ll last?”

He shrugged.  “Hundreds of years, give or take?”

I traced a carved heart surrounding a different set of initials and observed, “So this bar is sort of a memorial.  Like the people who carved these things still live on, in a way.”

Garrett frowned like he wanted to refute that but thought better of it.  Arcade hesitated and then made a sound halfway between a laugh and an awkward cough.  “I’m not sure if that’s morbid or sentimental.  Or both.”

I turned on my barstool to face him.  “It’s life,” I gestured at the names and dates, “It’s a record of life, an unintentional record of everyone’s need to feel like they won’t be forgotten.  That’s beautiful.”

He tilted his head and smiled a little.  “That got more philosophical than I expected from you.”

“You don’t expect me to admire the intricacies of life?”

“Well, you kind of killed people for a living.  You just seemed more…”

“Immoral?  Homicidal?”

“Well, that too, but I was going to say down-to-earth.”

“I can be down to earth and admire the natural world.  Those aren’t at all mutually exclusive.”

“But doing so in such an… existential way…”

I chuckled.  He was smiling enough now that I felt confident that I’d cheered him up.  “It appears to be a law that you cannot have a deep sympathy with both man and nature?”

I surprised him again.  “You’re quoting Thoreau?  Do you agree with that or are you saying that you appreciate nature _and_ have more empathy than you let on?”

“I have empathy and compassion, and I more than respect people as a part of nature.  I also respect, not necessarily society, but people as a group, which the transcendentalists, for the most part, didn’t seem to agree with.  I just accept that people can’t live in this world without killing unless they have nothing to defend, including themselves.”

“And your murder for the Legion was just inevitable?”

I shrugged and he started to get a little frustrated with me.  

“If the machine of government is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law.”

“Quoting Thoreau against me won’t work.  `The man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait till that other is ready.’”

Arcade tilted his head, working through that quote.  “So you were trying to convert Inculta to transcendentalism?  Or just teach him to respect life?”

I sipped my water and gestured uncertainly.  “Both, really.”

“A noble goal, but considering Nipton and Searchlight, I don’t think your efforts took root.”

My jaw would have dropped if I ever gaped, as it was I stared blankly at him, all emotion completely beneath the surface.  “Huh?”

Outrage made him more animated.  “Inculta is _responsible_ for Nipton.  _And_ Searchlight.  And probably a dozen other things we don’t know about, he’s been busy.”

“He’s been _dead_.”

Anger abated abruptly and Arcade eyed me, conflicting emotions frozen in his gaze.  At length, he asked, “Are you sure?”

My brows knit and then unknit and I fought down a wave of fury and grief to reply flatly.  “Yes.”  For a split second he’d looked relieved when I told him and I loathed how deeply that hurt almost as much as I hated that the doctor’s reaction was probably justified.  Whatever he’d done, I missed Vulpes, and I couldn’t decide how I felt about the idea of some Legion recruit claiming his name.  

However well I could hide most of my reactions, this left me openly wounded.  Arcade picked up on my mood.  “Coyote?”

I met his gaze.  I wasn’t crying, but I knew I showed the loss as plainly as I showed my rage in battle.  Whatever his feelings towards the Legion, towards my old partner and one of my closest friends, he cared about me a great deal.  I wanted to tell him my real name right then, but the bar was crowded, and noisy, and I preferred if James didn’t hear it, which he would have, standing beside us, idly cleaning glasses.  He didn’t make it obvious, which I appreciated, but he listened in.  It paid to know the mood and gossip of his customers.  

Arcade seemed curious, more than suspicious.  “What exactly…  Were you… close?”

Emotion brought out my most blunt and rational side.  “Are you asking if I cared about him or if I had sex with him?”

“…both.”

“Both.”

He’d leaned towards me, probably trying to be comforting, but he drew back a bit when I answered.  He sipped his drink.  I’d spent enough time as a spy, or rather a spy’s dog, to recognize that he was desperately hiding his disgust and trying to be understanding.  My patience ran a bit thin, as did my hope that I could steer this conversation back to something cheery and possibly seductive.  “I didn’t love him, not romantically anyway.”  I sipped my water, eyeing the bottles on the back shelf and very tempted to ask for one of them.  I _really_ didn’t want to explain this.  I spoke quickly, praying I wouldn’t be overheard.  “I knew him for maybe a decade, I didn’t see anyone else most weeks, he was the only one who… who knew about me, and I didn’t talk to anyone else until recently.  You can’t go through that kind of shit with someone and not get a little biased.  We were friends.  He was my only friend at the time.  He…  There were a lot of boring nights out alone in the middle of the desert and, well, one thing led to another.”  

I stared at a bottle I think was vodka while I let that sink in, feeling both Garrett and Arcade staring at me.  Garrett followed my gaze and I’d gone back to tracing the heart carved into the table by the time he brought the bottle over and poured me a shot.  “Okay, pal, you need a drink.”

I flinched as something touched my back and then realized it was just Arcade’s hand.  He’d either intended to pat my back or hug me, but pulled away when I’d jumped and now he wasn’t sure what to do.  He sat with his arm hovering awkwardly behind me for a moment, before letting it fall back to his side.  

“Sorry.”  

I had no idea if he was apologizing for startling me or for his reaction to what I’d said about Vulpes, but I took it as both.  I nodded and eyed the drink that Garrett had set in front of me.  I’d never had vodka and I felt curious enough that I considered trying it, but the smell burned my nose.  I sniffed it again.  

“You’ve never had a drink before, have you?”

“Not alcohol.”

Arcade smiled, even if it was bittersweet, and I appreciated how quickly he could hide his pain.  I guess I was, for the most part, the same way.  I leaned forward and very cautiously sipped the strange liquid.  I drank so little that the level of the glass hardly moved and instantly recoiled from the drink, grimacing and running my tongue through my mouth.  James and Arcade both laughed, joined by some equally good-natured laughter from a few patrons near the bar.  The winning-streak must have ended, things had gotten a bit quieter now.  

James gestured to the glass.  “Do you want to try again?  You might be more of a rum-and-nuka kind of guy.”  

I shook my head.  “No.  I… I think I’m not really a drinking kind of guy.”  Garrett looked like he might try to convince me otherwise, but then realized who he was talking to.  He shrugged and took the glass away, downing it himself.  

Arcade frowned slightly and I answered his unspoken question.  “That’s one of the only matters where I agree with the Legion, personally, anyway.  I thought I might reconsider, but no.  I won’t drink.”  He opened his mouth and I clarified, “I don’t mind if you do, I just won’t.  I don’t want to.”

That answered his questions.  “Okay.”  He grinned mischievously, finishing his own second drink and joking, “Oh, you only agree with the Legion that you shouldn’t drink?  So you’ll do all the chems in Freeside in step two of your plan to clean up the town?  The junkies will need to get creative.  More creative than usual, that is.”  

“Yes, you’d better keep a lock on your stimpaks.”

He frowned at me, not sure whether or not I was serious.  “…you know stimpaks aren’t—”

“Aren’t addictive, I know, I was joking.  I’d wanted to say something about the hookers, but couldn’t think of a good joke.”

“Hookers?” a drunk soldier behind us laughed, “Don’t the Legion only hump each other?”  He laughed riotously at his own joke and muttered a derogatory term loudly enough that the rest of the bar, probably knowing both our sexualities, got just a bit quieter.  It wasn’t worth trying to correct this guy directly, he was too drunk and probably too stupid to be swayed.  I looked at Arcade.  Even if I hadn’t wanted to kiss him before, the bigoted soldier and the way the doctor was scowling at him really convinced me.  I froze, desperately wanting to, but too terrified that things might go badly.  Come on…

I started to scoot forward on the bar stool and nearly collided with the muscular and incredibly attractive man who stepped between Arcade and I to place ten caps on the bar.  

“For a room.  The one on the end’s still free, right?”

James nodded, all business and concealing any annoyance he might have felt.  I hadn’t taken a good look at the stranger who’d been gambling all night, but I recognized that this was him, and grinning widely.  The eyes of the room had followed him here, some hungrily.  He must have won.  Not just won, but broke the bank.  His disarming grin made me want to like him, but not as much as annoyance left me inclined to hate him.  His roving gaze turned and lit on Arcade, who was still glaring at the drunk soldier, who hadn’t looked away.  

“Hey.”

Arcade glanced up, anger retreating as he made eye contact.  “Hey…”

This guy had the body of fucking Adonis, I wasn’t surprised by the tone of that “hey.”

Bastard-highroller, as I liked to think of him, leaned an elbow on the bar, completely blocking me from view.  “Would you want to join me?”

“Um, join you for what?”  However smooth he could be, either Arcade was drunk or this guy just made him incredibly nervous.  Probably both.  Looking at the build and size of the man beside me, I got the sense he was a soldier, or a similarly dangerous man as strongly dedicated to his ideals as Vulpes had been.  My first judgement turned out more accurate than even I had expected.  

The stranger gave a suggestive grin.  

Arcade laughed nervously.  Hesitantly.  “Uh…”

The high-roller turned up the charm.  “Come on.  I need a good-looking doctor to help take care of me in the big, bad wasteland.”  Arcade frowned a little, noting the obvious flaw of that statement and the stranger shrugged.  “Or bedroom.  Same difference.”

He kissed the doctor and more or less hauled him towards the stairs, not that Arcade resisted.  He broke the kiss to glance back at me and waved.  With his glasses somewhat askew and the stranger clearly distracting him, he didn’t notice my disappointment.  “Good night, Coyote.”

They made it up the stairs and vanished into the room the stranger had rented, leaving the drunk soldier scowling at the closed door and most of the bar hastily returning to their own business.  I sighed.  

“Fuck.”

James picked up a glass.  “I’ve got rum and cola, if you want it.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yeah, this is a really long chapter, I didn't want to split it up. And the courier shows up, and takes charge.


	7. Desperate Measures

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Coyote glimpses a ghost of his past. And everyone deals with deathclaws.

I returned to the Wrangler the next day, expecting things to be the same as they had been for the past few weeks.  But I guess change was inevitable.  James was nowhere to be seen and Francine mentioned that her brother was feeling a bit under the weather.  She didn’t mention Arcade until late evening.  “Look,” Francine refilled my drink for the third time and set the glass in front of me, “I hate to break it to you, but Arcade might not come here tonight.”  I frowned and looked up at her.  “I feel for you, even if you did point out to my brother that we’ve got dead folks’ names carved into our bar, but you missed your chance.  He’s been off with that courier all day, rumor has it they even got into the Lucky Thirty-eight.”

I frowned skeptically.  “Arcade?  On the Strip?”

Francine nodded.  “All I know is he went that way.  This courier’s got some kind of pull, he got Jacob Hoff to sober up and took care of those people who tried to cheat us —the ones I told you about last week— and supposedly he’s helping the Kings.  He’s done a lot of good around here.”

I sighed into my glass of water and then drank some.  

Francine shrugged.  “Hey, most of the time, you know it’s just like a `port in a storm’ for him, but this guy’s fucking charming.  If he weren’t, you know, batting for the other team, _I’d_ want to ride that horse.”

I gagged and she got less graphic.  “Look, I get why you hate the man, and it probably doesn’t help that he’s the fucking NCR poster boy, but Arcade likes him.  I thought he’d be back by now, but I guess not.”  She gestured at the shelf behind her.  “Want anything stronger?”

I shook my head and sighed.  “No.  The NCR poster boy?”

“He took out some Legion slavers, helped take back the prison, and I guess he’s been hunting down Fiends for them lately.  NCR can’t get enough of him.”  

“Bastard.”

She hesitated, cleaning a glass.  “You aren’t gonna do anything stupid, are you?  This guy’s tough.  And he’s got a lot of friends.  You seem like the only person who hates him.”

I groaned and nodded.  “I know.  I won’t kill him.  Not that I won’t think about it and wish I could.”

“Hey, one drink’s on the house, if you need it.  I sympathize.  If the courier hadn’t been so helpful, I’d hate him too, he won shit tons of caps from us yesterday.”

I turned her down and studied the carvings on the bar.  The radio started playing a love song and I sighed before a wave of pain sparked through my gut.  I hunched forwards and gritted my teeth.  This had been happening more often lately.  I didn’t know if this was radiation sickness, or something I’d eaten, or just a symptom of what I was.  It had been happening for months, almost since I’d gotten to Freeside.  If this was because I was a skinwalker, or because I’d eaten a tin can trying not to starve, I didn’t want Arcade to know, and there were no other doctors I would trust.  For a moment, the pain blotted out my senses and then it ebbed and I regained my focus.  

Francine held a hand protectively over the glass she’d been cleaning.  “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine.”

That lie didn’t come close to being believable.  I listened to the love song for a few more minutes, trying to think and hoping the pain was gone.  Maybe I’d get better if I spent a bit less time wandering the wilderness.  “You think James would hire me to sing here a few nights every week?”

Francine frowned.  “ _Can_ you sing?”

I sang several different refrains I knew and soon the whole bar was staring at me.  Francine had me sign a contract because she felt so certain James would want me hired.  I got much looser terms than they usually used partly because I wanted less pay and partly because they knew I’d cleared out most of the town’s thugs.  I sang off and on for the rest of the night, but I wasn’t really in the mood to sing for free.  I wasn’t in the mood to sing at all, but I wanted to keep coming here and didn’t want to wait at the bar alone, staring at the heart carved into the petrified oak.  Being on stage would help, and it might distract me, as well as giving me the option to stay in town for a day or two without being too poor to eat.  If it weren’t for my body, I’d have asked to fill one of the positions James had been advertising more covertly than stage entertainer.  If I’d been a man in body as well as mind, I would have probably acted much like Arcade, sexually speaking.  Getting paid didn’t go against my morals.  

When the crowd thinned out after midnight and proved Francine’s prediction accurate, my facade of relative happiness grew thin.  I stared at the bar, openly frowning and sighing so often that I got self-conscious about it.  Francine went to refill my glass of water and I stopped her.  

“You’ll at least pretend to be happy when you sing, right?”

“Of course.”  I started to sigh again and stopped myself.  “I’m good at that.”  I stood, “I’m heading home for the night.  See y—”  

My vision swam and I felt my knees buckle.  

The next thing I knew, somebody splashed water on my face.  Francine loomed over me, looking more concerned than I’d expected.  The bouncers and the few other patrons hadn’t even looked up.  Most of the Wrangler was used to drunks passing out, even if the Garretts tried to keep people from getting that sloppy.  Francine was the only one who knew I hadn’t been drinking.  

“Are you sick or something?”

I shook my head and sat up without really hearing the question.  I grabbed a bar stool and tried to get to my feet, but dizziness overcame me and I leaned against the bar.  My stomach churned, but I was more unnerved by the weird heat in my gut while the rest of my body felt oddly cold.  Was I bleeding?  

Francine called for one of the bouncers to help me to the Fort and I shook my head.  “I’m fine.  Happens all the time.”  I hated the fact that they were seeing me like this and stumbled out the door as soon as I could walk without waiting for her to answer.  I had no idea what I could do to feel better, if anything.  If I was going to be sick, I couldn’t change that.  If this was going to kill me, that’s what was going to happen and I didn’t expect that I could do anything to stop it.  If I was going to be sick for the rest of my life, that’s the way I would be.  

Whether or not this illness really would prove permanent, I realized that I would be sick, at least right now, about halfway down the street.  My stomach lurched, and I coughed, and threw up.  This late at night in Freeside, even now, I didn’t look out of place.  Aside from the Kings, smoking and hanging out at their headquarters, and a few stragglers walking to and from the Strip, most people out this late were drunks and junkies, either passed out, high out of their minds, or as sick as I was.  I tried to keep moving and had to stop as I was sick again.  Dizziness forced me to lean against a store front and I reached under my shirt to feel my stomach and make sure I hadn’t gotten cut on something.  No cut, only pain and a hot ache like an open wound that wasn’t there.  What the hell was wrong with me?  

Blearily, my gaze scanned the streets until I recovered enough to move again.  In an age-old instinct, I had to watch, had to stay alert for fear of any threat.  My vision swam with pain and scent was masked by the smell of my own vomit.  

Amid the haze, a man in a dark suit paused by the Freeside gate, stopping to look at me.  He took off his hat to run a hand through short black hair.  He grimaced, or maybe he laughed, and walked away.  It must have been a mix of pain and disorientation that almost made me believe he had been Vulpes.  

My stomach ran out of ammo and my head reconnected with my legs.  I stumbled back to my bed and I’m not sure whether I fell asleep or passed out.  

*       *        *

I hadn’t planned to be away from the Fort even overnight, but Wolf had a way of talking me into things.  He had a way of talking anyone into or out of almost anything.  In four days, he had me convinced that he could make things happen.  I didn’t necessarily appreciate how fanatically he served the NCR, but freeing slaves, getting the Powder Gangers back under control, and putting the Fiends out of their misery weren’t the sort of jobs I wanted to stop.  He’d been shot in the head, thought dead to the point that he’d actually been buried, and then he trekked across the breadth of the Mojave to talk his way into the Tops and kill the head of the Chairmen for trying to murder him and take over the Strip.  Once he explained his reasons, I even agreed with him, and I tried to think I wasn’t too biased.  In four days, I’d seen him convince so many people to help him in so many different ways, and I’d seen how incredibly dedicated Wolf could be.  If anyone could stop the Legion, it had to be him.  But he was horrible with technology, and medicine, and in barely a day he’d also convinced me that he knew even less about close-quarters fighting than I did, which was really saying something.  He asked me to join him during the day, patch him up and help with any computers he might run into, and that seemed more useful than concocting another few dozen combinations of plants in a vain effort to make something useful.  

When I saw him in the Wrangler, I hadn’t expected anything beyond the way my nights usually went.  I’d been a bit more drunk than usual, probably due to my mood, and I wasn’t too clear on the details of that night itself, but my head had cleared by morning.  I’d fallen asleep in his room in the Wrangler, and when I woke up, he was still there, waiting on a chair in the corner and looking lost in thought.  I didn’t only sleep with locals, but thus far every night I’d spent with someone from out of town had ended with them leaving before I did, and I rarely spent the entire night.  Usually, this was a reprieve.  I didn’t have anyone significant, romantically speaking, and locals especially knew that if I slept with them, it was just sex.  Things being as bleak around here as they were, most people took what they could get, and I’d had too many bad break-ups to want to start anything right now.  Actually, after the last one, I’d figured that I would wait a year before really getting involved with anyone else.  And then, after a year, there wasn’t really anyone I found myself interested in, so I decided to wait another year, and things just progressed from there.  I hadn’t actually had a committed relationship in nearly a decade, they just made an already dangerous and bleak life even more complicated, and I hadn’t even remotely expected to be starting one now.  

If Wolf had told me his name the night I met him, I didn’t remember it the next morning.  I have no idea if he realized or even suspected this, but he introduced himself again when he noticed I was awake.  He offered me an apple.  “Hey,” he nodded to the plasma defender I’d placed on the bedside table on top of my clothes, “you seem like you can take care of yourself in the wasteland, right?  I wasn’t just flirting last night, I really could use a doctor to patch me up out there, if you’d be interested…”  It wasn’t just a standard invitation.  I’d dated often enough that I could tell he meant a bit more than that.  Something about him just made me want to agree.  

I hadn’t decided to accompany him right way, we talked about it for a while, and I became more aware of how incredibly charming Wolf could be, despite his name.  Even without knowing his history, everything he’d done for the NCR and how he’d survived a bullet to the skull, the man had presence.  He wasn’t all that tall, or intimidating, but he was _very_ handsome, and he just drew attention by his very existence.  It felt like a privilege just to know him, and the idea that he might be interested in me romantically…  Part of me had still balked at the idea of starting something again, after so many years, but I hadn’t been surprised when he changed my mind within the week.  

What really made me like him, more than his natural likability, was the idea that this man could change the fate of the entire Mojave.  He talked me into going onto the Strip with him and I watched in amazement as Securitrons let him into the Lucky 38.  Evidently, House wanted to talk to him.  Not only that, he gave Wolf a suite in the place.  After dealing with Benny and a more unexpected problem, I had planned to head back to the Fort and maybe stop at the Wrangler just to let Coyote know what had happened.  Wolf convinced me instead to join him in his suite.  Admittedly, it was luxury, even if it was also horribly creepy, but with him there I hardly noticed the gloom.  

I’d expected to return to the Fort the day after that, but the NCR ambassador had a dangerous mission for Wolf and as soon as he looked my way I knew I’d be joining him.  Running through an artillery bombardment was by no means my forte, nor was fighting exploding giant ants, and yet I found I didn’t mind it so much when we made it through both incidents barely alive and Wolf smiled at me.  I have never been so close to death so often, but by some miracle Wolf almost made it look easy.  Half the time he was covered in blood and laughing like a lunatic because _he_ didn’t even think we’d survive, but the guy was a crack shot with the military issue hunting rifle he carried and he could take more of a beating than anyone I’d ever seen.  He certainly hadn’t been exaggerating; he really needed a doctor out here with how often he tempted fate.  

I liked him more than I wanted to.  Physically, he looked great.  His body, his amber eyes, and his charmingly ruffled red hair gave him a look that turned heads everywhere he went, but I found myself more dazzled by the man himself, his laugh, his unwavering courage, and the way I could tell that he _knew_ he could change things around here.  I wasn’t above crushing on gorgeous men, but I hadn’t really fallen for anyone before, not since I was a teenager.  Even then, I’m not sure I’d really call that love, that had been hormones, this was… I don’t know what this was.  The guy was amazing, like a knight in shining armor stepped out of a fairy tale and just as fanatical.  In a long life of fear and disappointment, I wasn’t very willing to trust my heart on this.  

We made it back to Freeside almost a week after we’d left.  We got into town late, so I just left a note apologizing and explaining to Julie and joined Wolf at the Wrangler before any of the Followers could ask where I’d been.  Wolf sat at the bar on Coyote’s usual chair and I sat beside him.  The place was more crowded than usual today, and not seeing the ex-legionary in the vicinity, I figured he’d already gone home.  I was wrong.  

James brought us a drink and the three of us chatted for a while.  The Garrett had a smile like I was missing something, I’d seen him grin that way when drunks asked where they’d put the hat they hadn’t removed.  I couldn’t figure out why he turned it on me now.  

“What?”

The grin ebbed a lot, replaced by his usual friendly demeanor.  He gestured to the stage.  “We got a new performer while you were gone.”

Wolf and I turned to see.  

Rowdy as always, the crowd had been a bit quieter aside from a few people singing along with what I’d mistaken for a radio or jukebox.  Coyote stood on the stage, singing spectacularly.  A speaker beside him provided the instruments for the songs and I would have thought he just lip-synced the vocals except that his voice had an audibly different tone from the playback.  His singing carried the songs; the instruments were sparse, usually just a guitar or maybe a drum, and the drum wasn’t always on the beat.  When we turned around, he was just finishing the Ode to Joy in German (I got the distinct impression that he didn’t actually know the translation or speak any other German, for that matter, although neither did I.)  He hit every note perfectly and sounded so good that my jaw dropped.  I hadn’t even for a second imagined that he could sing, let alone this well.  

Wolf watched as Coyote switched to a new song, jumping jarringly from the hymn to a particularly upbeat rendition of “It’s Only a Paper Moon.”  Wolf chuckled.  “ _Damn_ , he can sing!”

I got over my surprise enough to close my mouth and nodded.  

Wolf looked over at me while Coyote waved my way, but couldn’t stop his act.  “Did you know he could sing?”

I shook my head, more focused on the ex-legionary.  He couldn’t have learned that from the Legion, could he?  It had to be a talent he was just born with.  He could make a living on the Strip with a voice like that, not that I liked the idea of him working in a place packed with off-duty soldiers and degenerates.  I’d always felt that it was a shame he’d ever been part of the Legion, even if he just seemed to accept his past, but now it bothered me even more deeply that the Legion had shaped someone like him into a soldier.  His singing made it stand out; I hadn’t thought about it before, but his transcendentalist views and general respect for life just didn’t mesh with the man I’d assumed he was.  I’d thought he was a Legion-raised kid who didn’t know any better and had been brainwashed into agreeing with them, thinking their enemies really weren’t worth the air they breathed, but it was worse, he’d been an educated child, maybe even a pacifist, who loved to read and, apparently, could sing, and they had made him a killing machine simply by convincing him that he had no alternative.  And he’d found Vulpes Inculta, and grown up with him, and no doubt that had made them both even more violent and willing to kill.  

I didn’t understand why Coyote had insisted so strongly that Inculta was dead.  He must have believed it; he was too emotional to be lying, and why would he have lied?  Maybe the Legion was lying.  Inculta had a reputation, it made sense that they would deny his death, maybe even to the point of having his successor take his name.  But that didn’t explain how they looked so alike.  Maybe the Legion had intentionally trained and sent a look-a-like—?

Wolf jolted me out of my thoughts with a kiss.  “Come on,” he nodded to the stairs, “It’s been a long day.”

It had, and I was tired.  I glanced up the stairs at the room he’d presumably bought again and then looked back at the stage.  Coyote had gone into a new song, “Hound Dog,” eerily replicating the exact sound of the King’s voice.  I looked at Garrett.  “When does his act end?”

Garrett checked the clock.  “A few hours.”

I was probably too tired to stay awake for a few hours, and Wolf didn’t seem willing to just wait here that long.  In fact, he looked downright impatient, I hadn’t seen him act like that before and I figured his leg might still be sore from a particularly nasty ant bite.  

“I can call him over, if you want.”

I knew Garrett well enough to figure that Coyote would forfeit some pay if he took a break.  The guy looked like he’d actually been gaining weight, but he probably needed the money just to survive.  He didn’t have another job, that I knew of.  I shook my head.  “Just tell him I said `Hi.’”  I looked back at Wolf and followed him upstairs.  

~       ~      ~

Things slowed down a little in the week after that.  Wolf ran more errands for the NCR and helped them around McCarren.  He said it wasn’t dangerous work and we mutually agreed that it was best if I went back to the Fort for a while.  I settled back into my routines of mixing plants and hoping for the best, though I’d gotten just a little bit more hopeful about it.  I still counted the hours until dinner time when I’d go to join Wolf at his new room in the Wrangler.  He’d taken care of McCaffery, an arrogant bounty hunter and a thorn in the Garretts’ sides, so they’d given Wolf the man’s old room instead of the one he’d been renting.  

Working with the plants, I spent a lot of time walking from tent to tent getting samples from storage and then a lot more time walking around while I waited for the samples to react, or separate, or whatever I happened to be trying on them at the time.  Aside from a new rash of attacks on the locals, Freeside had actually been getting better recently.  Wolf had sobered up practically every drunk he found, and as word spread, some of the other addicts tried to follow that example.  As a result, most of the Followers had free time, for a change, but I was usually left alone in the research tents, so I didn’t expect even Julie to drop by.  I let my mind wander while I waited and inevitably most of my thoughts centered on Wolf.  Some of the time I wondered how the Mojave would turn out when he took it over for the NCR— I wanted to believe that with Wolf working for them it would be better than I had feared— but more often than not I just wondered what Wolf would come up with tonight.  He had to be the most inventive guy I’d ever slept with, which was really saying something.  

I was considering the latter topic when someone stepped into the tent behind me.  

“Hey.”  

I jumped and dropped the notes I’d been holding.  I could see how Coyote had been a frumentarius; he made absolutely no sound when he walked, even on the dusty, rocky ground in here.  “Hey.”  I picked up my notes and set them down, only half looking at him until I caught sight of the massive bundle in his arms.  Coyote waited patiently, his usual peaceful smile on his face despite the fact that he held something the size of a large dog in his arms.  It must have weighed eighty pounds and he cradled the blanket-wrapped package effortlessly, so I figured it had to be lighter than it looked.  “What is that?”

Coyote glanced uneasily over his shoulder, the first cause for concern, and stepped a bit further into the tent before opening the top of the bundle to form a sort of hammock for whatever lay in his arms.  “He’s hurt, I wasn’t sure where else to take him.”

I stepped towards him to take a look, expecting a dog or maybe a mole rat at the most exotic.  Coyote, of course, would never take in anything so harmless.  I had to lean forward to see the thing snuggled down in what must have been six or seven thick wool blankets and doing so got me close enough that my arm brushed Coyote’s wrist and the creature’s shoulder.  Deep in the shadows and wool, it took me much longer than it should have to recognize the faintly glowing white face staring back at me.  I didn’t realize what I was looking at until Coyote shifted his grip, knocking some more blankets loose and exposing a set of very recognizable claws.  

I scrambled backward.  “Jeez!  Coyote, what are you _doing_ with that?!”

He draped the young deathclaw a bit more carefully, cradling it in just one arm, “It’s hurt, it won’t survive in the wild.”

“Yes, but it’s got plenty of easy prey here.”  

My sarcasm didn’t amuse him.  “Arcade, it’s a baby, and this one seems less aggressive than usual.”  He set the bundle down and closed the tent, nudging the baby out of the blankets.  It was kind of cute, in a terrifying, lethal way.  A tiny face, budding horns already visible, poked out of the wool and the deathclaw got to its feet, stumbling and dragging one leg.  The foot hung uselessly beneath a clearly broken femur.  The baby only made it a few feet before it sat down, whistling pitifully.  I’d never actually heard a baby deathclaw.  I frowned at Coyote.  

“It whistles?”

Coyote shrugged.  “The big ones sort of hiss, I guess this is the closest they can get to crying.”  He stooped to pet the thing.  “Hush.  It’s going to be okay.”  He gave me a pleading stare and nodded at the helpless creature.  

I sighed.  “What are you going to do with it?  It has a broken leg, that doesn’t heal instantly and I can’t know how stimpaks would work on a deathclaw.  It’s going to need to recover.”

“I’ll take care of him until he does.”  I gave him a pointed stare which Coyote returned just as pointedly.  “Where do you think I found him?”

I hadn’t considered that, so I thought for a moment.  “The Thorn?”

Coyote shook his head.  “Quarry Junction.  I can handle myself, Arcade, I can take care of him if you fix his leg.  I’ve fought deathclaws before.”

I think he knew that I didn’t believe him.  He still seemed the type of guy to try to talk himself up, and psychologically, I could see a lot of reasons he might feel the need to overcompensate.  I was going to refuse, but glancing down, I saw those big, eerily glowing eyes watching me hopefully.  It was some sort of mutant, even for a deathclaw; aside from the lack of pigment it had a greenish tint like it had been massively irradiated and from what I knew of deathclaws, waiting quietly and cooperating were not their strongest traits.  If I refused, I’d be sentencing a pretty unique little creature to death, and I couldn’t do that, especially when it looked this adorable.  It whistled again, cementing my decision.  “Okay.  Be careful.”

I’d expected missing fingers or at the very least a few bad cuts, but the surgery went better than my best case predictions.  Geiger, as Coyote dubbed him, hobbled around on three legs as soon as the cast set.  The active little deathclaw seemed overjoyed and he expressed this by making a run for the tent flap.  By some miracle Coyote caught him before he escaped and bundled the little terror back in the blankets, at which point he promptly lay still.  

Seeing my confusion, Coyote explained, “I think it may be some sort of tonic immobility.”  At this point, I wasn’t sure if I was more shocked that he knew what that was or that he’d figured out how to do it to a deathclaw.  “Thanks,” Coyote added, smiling again, even more happily than when he’d first arrived, “I’m going to keep him in my place until he’s recovered.  See you later.”  He walked out, leaving me wondering how exactly I’d met two people as wildly unique as Coyote and Wolf.  

*       *       *

I kept Geiger in my house and found that the little deathclaw could be surprisingly easy to entertain, even if he couldn’t read.  I found old kids toys for him and told him stories when I had time.  Used life with his own kind, he understood the simple command of “don’t leave this house” and thus remained hidden.  He ate more than I did, and considering that my normally substantial appetite had grown even larger lately, this was saying something.  Between my own hunting trips and my wages from the Wrangler, I found myself eating enough that I could feed us both and still have caps left over.  After a few shredded blankets I stopped by Mick and Ralph’s to make Geiger something equivalent to gloves.  The brothers, to their credit, made enough money selling what I brought in that they didn’t ask why I needed machete sheaths attached to leather straps.  I made the gloves myself to make sure that the fit.  I wasn’t half bad with metal and leather; I had never really smithed, but I’d learned to maintain weapons while traveling with Vulpes and I guess I had some talent for it.  I didn’t want to join the competition between the local arms dealers or I might have started a business as a smith.  Besides, singing gave me an excuse to hang out in the Wrangler, where I might eventually have the chance to talk to Arcade, even if Wolf had thus far ensured that the left the bar before I could get off-stage.  

I’d tried to just think of him as an opportunist, a man who happened to swoop in while I hesitated and who probably hadn’t even realized how I felt.  Now I wasn’t so sure.  His political allegiances aside, Wolf just seemed too perfect.  I didn’t trust him.  He had done noble work, that much I had to admit, but the impression he gave just seemed too perfect and I didn’t trust him.  He had to be hiding something.  A man could be perfect in all ways, he had a dark side and I felt driven to find it.  Maybe I only thought that because it was what Vulpes would think in this position.  Everyone had a flaw, or a weakness, and he’d spent too much time learning to exploit that to consider that it might not be the case.  I wasn’t sure if I felt the same way.  

I worked at the Wrangler more often now that I had to watch Geiger.  It wasn’t just so I could care for him; as time went on whatever was wrong with me got worse and I found that even relatively short walks started to wear on me.  When I tried to reach the mountains, I only got halfway before I had to rest and I could only keep up my standard pace for half the trip.  I found myself getting sick so often that Geiger seemed to realize something was wrong.  The little deathclaw wasn’t smart enough to know I was lying when I told him I was fine.  

I still took two days off every week, back to back just in case I couldn’t make it home in time, and I’d spend these days as I had used to, hunting and scavenging as the trader people still called Skye.  Aside from Mick and Ralph, the people who bought my wares mostly stayed out of Freeside, so thus far no one had really pieced together that I was Skye and Coyote.  I’d gotten a new outfit, a dark suit that I wore to the Wrangler, which probably made me less recognizable and helped to ensure that.  It wasn’t comfortable for trading and hunting and I felt like I looked good in it.  I hoped Arcade would agree, but he didn’t seem to notice or care.  Sickness drove me to sing more than a desire to attract his attention, but he hardly even looked at me.  I felt more ignored than before I’d had the courage to even approach him.  I didn’t expect him to drop everything to talk to me, but I liked to think that we’d at least been friends and now the only time I managed to talk to him was when I took in an injured deathclaw just to have an excuse to visit him at work.  I couldn’t fake something and didn’t want to risk him finding out about my condition.  I hated the idea of lying about anything for an excuse to visit him, and that was, in essence, why I hadn’t tried to heal Geiger myself or just left him alone.  Nature could be harsh, I’d learned that a long time ago, not that I always agreed with it.  With Geiger on the mend, I needed a different reason to visit Arcade at work and I had yet to come up with one.  

I didn’t like interrupting Arcade’s work even for a valid reason, but with Wolf around I had little choice.  I could tell that Arcade wasn’t trying to ignore me.  He’d come in for a drink during my act and James claimed that the doctor usually talked Wolf into staying and listening for at least a little while, despite the courier’s suggestions to head upstairs.  The problem was that, whether in the Wrangler or on the streets, whenever Wolf saw me, he went out of his way to make sure that Arcade did not.  In the Wrangler, he talked constantly and was so absurdly attentive that even Arcade seemed to realize what he was doing.  He had to, right?  However good he looked, I couldn’t be the only one realizing how manipulative Wolf could be.  The few times I’d seen them outside and headed towards them to talk, Wolf had detoured through back alleys just to avoid me, even when those alleys lead to dead ends.  I hadn’t been lucky enough yet to catch Arcade’s eye before his boyfriend spotted me, so Wolf always managed these diversions without the doctor catching on to his reasons.  It got so frustrating that I considered ambushing them just to chat, but that seemed rude and awkward.  I knew I could sneak up on them without Wolf catching me, but doing so just felt creepy and cruel.  I tried to come up with some reason to visit the Fort more regularly, but so far I had nothing.  

This dilemma distracted me on one of my days off.  The desert sun baked my skin.  My sweat had dried long ago, but I had a canteen for when the dehydration really got to me.  Shimmers of heat painted the air in every direction, shifting blue over tan and brown and obscuring my view, but only slightly.  My nose burned with the heat and I felt my tongue like wadded cotton, stuck to the roof of my mouth.  I could taste the scent of my prey even from this distance, I was downwind, above but dangerously close to the pack.  I lay awkwardly on my side, blanket spread out below me over the rocks, lining up a shot with the rifle I’d bought exclusively for this purpose.  My stomach had bothered me more and more lately, until I could no longer put pressure on it.  I wasn’t a great shot under normal circumstances, and the uncomfortable angle made my aim worse, but that was why I’d bought explosive rounds.  I didn’t need to hit directly, just close enough, and I could handle my prey if it came after me.  

I didn’t usually hunt with explosives, normally that was as poor a decision as it sounded, but right now I opted for caution and stopping power; there would probably be enough meat left unharmed for my purposes.  Aiming down the scope, I picked out my target, a big female, one of the healthiest and least sickly of the pack.  She stood down by the rails at the far end of the group, sharpening her claws.  I hoped that Geiger wouldn’t smell the meat on me.  

I squeezed the trigger and the recoil slid the butt of the rifle under my shoulder, grazing my chest to smack my gut.  I saw the explosion on my eyelids without seeing the bullet hit and curled up in agony for a long moment, forgetting the rest of the pack until I stopped feeling like I’d swallowed a live grenade.  Muscles spasmed and I willed them to stop.  I’d thought that my stomach once again protested my diet, but that wasn’t the case, these were lower.  My mind finally won out and when I could trust that illness wouldn’t reveal my presence, I sat up to survey the damage.  I felt hot bruises growing under my own skin, but the deathclaws hadn’t found me.  The big female lay dead, her head flung from her body and most of her chest splattered across the dirt.  I only hunted deathclaws that might prove especially dangerous.  This pack had been growing large and the big female might soon have moved on to start her own pack.  I hadn’t hunted just to control the threat, my main reason had been much simpler than that.  

Looking down into the railyard, I saw the other deathclaws approaching the body but unable to determine what happened.  They’d been gathered by the water, cooling off and quenching their thirst, and I expected them to go back there shortly.  No scavengers would go near the carcass with the rest of the pack nearby and I could use the box cars as cover to take my kill once the pack relaxed again.  From my vantage point, I considered myself safe as long as I stayed quiet, and I had plenty of time to wait.  

I’d come out here many times to watch this pack and enjoy the desert.  Waiting to retrieve my kill, I let myself relax.  Crows traversed the cloudless blue sky, dark specks in the distance.  Brush rustled to my left and a rattlesnake moved into the shade.  Scouting ants scurried over the unfamiliar terrain of my blanket, pausing by my fingers before climbing over them.  I studied every detail of the world around me and, for a moment, I felt completely at peace.  

A breeze from the East brushed my hair back over my shoulders and carried familiar scents.  Arcade.  And Wolf.  My eyes scanned the desert.  

I’d drawn the pack towards the road and they were still there, sniffing and growling around the body of their fallen comrade.  The boxcars would hide them just as effectively as they would hide my approach along the road.  Over a dozen deathclaws.  Following the road east my eyes found Arcade and the courier, walking this way, talking and laughing, oblivious to the danger ahead.  They had to be a hundred yards away, at least, but only fifty from the deathclaws.  

I couldn’t yell, they wouldn’t hear me and it would only draw the deathclaws my way.  I didn’t want to kill the whole pack.  These were dangerous animals, but they didn’t deserve to die.  I drew my machete and held the blade to catch the sunlight, flicking it back and forth in a desperate hope to alert my friend.  Wolf could wander into the pack all he wanted, I didn’t care what happened to him, but I had to warn Arcade.  

For once I caught the doctor’s attention.  He shaded his eyes and seemed to squint my way.  At this distance, he wouldn’t recognize me and I had few options to communicate.  I gestured frantically, trying to turn them south, off the road and away from the trainyard.  Arcade stopped, trying and I hope realizing what I meant.  Wolf hadn’t noticed any of this.  He stood staring towards the traincars and I watched him draw his service rifle.  He must have seen the blood, but he couldn’t know yet what it belonged to.  He probably assumed it was human.  

The courier said something and Arcade started to follow him.  

I grabbed my rifle, wrapped my blanket over my shoulders as a cloak and started down the slope at a run.  The recoil must have done more than I’d thought; my gut lurched with every step and I felt dizzy and cold in the desert heat.  Rock shifted and slid below my boots, but the pack had found other prey to hunt. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The very last part hasn't been edited yet. If there are any glaring typos or serious problems, please tell me. I may edit it on my own and upload that, but I might just leave it as is and move on.


	8. Something's Gotta Give

Rounding the edge of the boxcar, we both expected Legion soldiers, or just the aftermath of a raider attack.  We found deathclaws.  Backpedaling over the tracks amid a storm of hissing and growling, Wolf emptied a magazine at the largest one near us, putting it down before either of us could tell it was dead.  My first shot liquified a juvenile and my next six didn’t even slow the adult closing in on us.  

Geiger might have been cute, but even the smallest of these had to be twice his size and angry, making the whole baby-animal effect much less apparent.  Claws grazed my forearm, shredding my sleeve as I struggled to reload.  Beside me, a different deathclaw gored Wolf in the side and took a bullet to the eye while another one rushed in to take its place.  There had to be over a dozen of them.  

Amid the chaos of claws, teeth, and horns, and frantically trying not to die, I didn’t notice that we weren’t alone until a machete gutted the animal currently going for my throat.  My gun clicked without firing again and I dropped it to draw my ripper, opting for the weapon I didn’t need to reload in the hope that, with such a storm of keratin, I was bound to hit something trying to kill me.  I couldn’t make sense of this particularly crazy combat until the dust settled.  

Coyote stood in front of us, covered in blood and leaning against a train car as he struggled to catch his breath.  He had a rifle on his back, but he hadn’t used it.  With his thick hair wild and wet, blood dripping from his mouth, and a hunch to his shoulders that suggested intense pain, he wasn’t looking his best.  He wiped the blood off his face with a blanket and I saw that his dark skin had paled alarmingly.  He shivered, completely dry, despite the heat that had both myself and Wolf covered in sweat.  I caught my breath as he paused his panting to drink from a large canteen he had with him.  

“What are you _doing_ out here?  Do you have a death wish?!”  

Coyote gulped down some water and wiped his mouth with the back of a bloodstained hand.  “I thought I was saving your life, what are _you_ doing out here?”

Wolf coughed and stood up, reminding me that he was still here and pretty cut up from the claws that had gotten through his armor.  I ignored him.  “Saving—?!”  I sighed and ran a hand through my hair, “Coyote, Garrett told me you passed out the other day and both the twins are worried about you.  The _twins_ are worried about you, do you know how much it takes to worry them?  And you come all the way out here—?!  What is _wrong_ with you?!!”

Coyote looked and sounded perfectly calm.  He curled forward in a deceptively casual stance, one hand on his gut and his eyes watering enough that I knew he was in pain.  I could hear him struggling to catch his breath as he answered.  “Are you asking or are you just criticizing my decisions?”

“Both!”

He hesitated.  For moment he seemed to search for the right words and then he glanced towards Wolf and straightened his back, folding his arms across his chest and trying to look as in control as he could manage.  “I’m fine.  Why are you out here?”  

At this point I figured he just wasn’t going to tell me what was wrong with him.  I couldn’t diagnose him if he wouldn’t talk about it, and the guesses I could think of were all equally bad.  Asking would just annoy him and right now I was too angry that he’d risked his life out here, presumably in some effort to prove himself or, more ideally, in a misguided need to be one with nature.  I planned to ask again later and just try to figure it out.  He really had me worried.  Even back in Freeside, collapsing and being violently ill for no apparent reason was a bad sign.  I would have thought him an alcoholic if I hadn’t seen firsthand that he refused to drink.  If he’d fainted out here, alone… even if nothing dangerous found him, the desert itself would have killed him.  

Wolf scowled at Coyote.  At first I thought that he shared my concern.  “Why are _we_ out here?” he snapped, “What are _you_ doing out here?  You didn’t come out here to fight deathclaws.”

Coyote returned his glare.  “On the contrary,” he shuffled through the slaughter and hefted a massive thigh over one shoulder, pausing only to hack it free of the rest of the leg.  

“Why the hell are you hunting deathclaws?”  I asked, and Wolf didn’t seem to care.  

“Because I wanted deathclaw steak.”  It _was_ a reasonable explanation, I guess, in the way that the rationalizations of addicts could be reasonable.  

“And you can’t just eat brahmin steak instead?”  

“It doesn’t taste the same.”  He said that so calmly, as if it made perfect sense to go out and hunt down a deathclaw on a whim.  Any ghost of anger had faded from his voice as soon as he was talking to me and not Wolf.  

I sighed and raised my hands in exasperation.  “Isn’t that a little cruel, considering Geiger?”

Coyote sort of shrugged.  “I planned to eat it outside somewhere, before I get home.  Hopefully he won’t smell it on me.”

Wolf frowned at both of us, but didn’t ask about Geiger.  He turned to Coyote.  “Bullshit.  There is no way you just came out here to hunt deathclaws, what were you really doing?”

“What were _you_ doing?”  I opened my mouth to point out that was personal and then berated myself for having a dirty mind as he continued, “Wanted to visit the site of the Bitter Springs massacre, make it some sort of monument to the fucking NCR?”  

“Whoa.  _Whoa_.  Since when was this a political argument?”

Wolf ignored me and clenched his hands around his rifle in a way that made me uncomfortable for a lot of reasons.  “I should, it would give Legion bastards like yourself a reminder to respect what the NCR can do!”  

“Whoa!”  I really hoped that was just Wolf’s anger getting the better of him.  The guy did sometimes say things he didn’t mean in the heat of combat.  I stepped between them before a fight broke out.  “Guys!  Both of you just calm down!  Let’s leave politics well out of this, okay?”

Coyote had that blank stare that made me think of Inculta’s posters.  He seemed perfectly calm, but I had no idea how sincere it was when he nodded.  “Fine.”

Wolf glared at Coyote and then glanced at me.  “Alright.”

The two of them had all the benevolence of a cazador swarm, but at lest they weren’t actively trying to kill each other.  They stared for a long moment, the hate all but tangible.  Wolf broke the silence with a warning.  

“Whatever.  You shouldn’t be out here alone.”

“Oh?” Coyote puffed himself up, “Last _I_ saw, you were the ones who would have died if I hadn’t been here.  Did you even know this pack was out here?”  He was thinner, even if he’d been putting on weight and no longer had the wiry musculature of his namesake, but Wolf must have weighed about the same, but beefier with a broader build.  The two of them clearly had too much ego and stubbornness to accept each other peacefully.  

Wolf snapped back at him, “Check your eyes!  I have my rifle, we would have been fine!”

“That close to fifteen of them?  With a service rifle?  Yeah, right.  You don’t know the first thing about fighting deathclaws.”

“Oh, and I suppose you’re an expert?”

“Guys,” I tried to interrupt and neither of them heard me.  

“I’ve studied them for years,—”

“Get a life!”

Coyote opened and closed his mouth, giving me the chance I needed to step between them.  “Guys, calm down!  Let’s just head back to Freeside, okay?  We don’t want to be stuck out here at night.”

I got the distinct feeling that Coyote would have disagreed about that if I’d been anyone else.  As it was, he let me diffuse the situation a bit.  Wolf nodded.  “Alright,” He glared at Coyote, “but we do things my way.”

Coyote scoffed but bit back his retort.  Wolf gave him a long stare, daring him to speak.  Coyote didn’t take the bait, but returned his gaze with the same silent aggression I’d seen in caged deathclaws when I’d been a kid.  Even at his worst, I couldn’t imagine Wolf really scaring anyone, but Coyote just gave the impression that he could do horrific things if he wanted to.  Considering his past, I didn’t doubt that, though I did suspect that he greatly exaggerated his actual combat prowess.  A transexual guy raised in the Legion had to have a screwed up view of masculinity, and acting like he hunted whole packs of deathclaws all the time and considered them harmless pets fit right in with that theory.  Likewise, I attributed his need to conceal any weakness he might have to the same need to appear invincible.  The Legion probably didn’t have the best healthcare system, for all I knew they just executed anyone who got too sick.  At least Coyote had the grace to shut his mouth and try to be civil.  

Wolf, on the other hand, had been a reasonably humble guy most of the time that I’d known him.  Hell, he went out of his way on errands for anyone he met and he’d been incredibly courteous with everyone who wasn’t actively set on our murder, except Coyote.  This just wasn’t like him and I couldn’t understand what had brought on such hostility.  Even the rumor that Coyote had been a member of the Legion didn’t explain how completely Wolf had hated him from the very start.  

I checked my arm and made sure I didn’t have any more serious injuries before eyeing Wolf and rummaging for my first aid kit.  He stopped me with a gesture, never letting Coyote out of his sight.  “I’ll be fine.”

Great, now they were both being idiots.  I sighed and closed my bag.  

Nobody wanted to talk on the way back to Freeside.  Coyote and Wolf shut up, presumably to avoid provoking each other.  I got the sense that they only backed down because I was there, trying to keep the peace.  I didn’t want to get them started again by trying to chat.  I walked between them with Coyote on my left and Wolf on my right, both of them adamantly pretending that the other didn’t exist.  

For an ex-soldier, I found it odd that Coyote seemed unable to keep pace with me and Wolf.  He habitually sped up until his long strides had him almost running and then forced himself to slow down.  I heard him breathing heavily after the first few times that this happened.  I gave him a questioning frown which hopefully conveyed my concern and he just frowned back, nodding at Wolf.  

At a glance, Wolf looked perfectly comfortable with the pace and the long walk.  He strode over the pavement with all the ease and swagger of a king, but it didn’t take too long to spot the blood on his armor and the way he held his left arm gingerly at his side.  He was putting on a show, pretending that those deathclaws hadn’t even scared him.  They brought out the absolute worst in each other.  

*        *       *

Watching that smug bastard pretend he wasn’t injured, I almost laughed.  I hoped he’d trip or collapse and then he’d _need_ to have his wounds tended to.  I wasn’t acting like an invalid around him when even as sick as I felt right now, I could _still_ survive more easily than he could.  

We got lucky on the way back, the cazador swarms didn’t go near us and something must have drawn the geckos back into their cave.  The empty and silent desert around us unnerved me.  I knew there had to be something responsible for the absence of the normal threats, and I scanned the hills for the cause.  On a rocky ledge usually prowled by geckos, I spotted a dark shape.  Light gleamed on glass before the man lowered his arms.  Binoculars.  In the shadow of the rocks, I couldn’t see color, but my mind placed his clothes as a Legion uniform and the changing wind brought a familiar scent.  I swore it was Vulpes, but before I could race after him, he vanished and I couldn’t decide if he had ducked into a cave or never been there at all.  My vision blurred and dizziness washed over me again.  

*       *       *

Wolf’s behavior baffled me enough that I thought about it as we walked.  Coyote might have reason to provoke him, but the ex-legionary seemed much too open to do that and avoid their inevitable fight.  If he wanted to fight Wolf, he wouldn’t harass him, he’d just confront him.  Oddly enough, I would imagine it much like a duel.  Coyote, aside from hiding whatever physical maladies he might have, tended to wear his heart on his sleeve, from what I’d seen; if he wanted to fight Wolf, for any reason, he would have simply walked up to him and said something like “let’s settle this.”  The guy didn’t seem the sort to toy with people.  Wolf, on the other hand, could not be more direct if he’d been an idiot.  They were going to fight and might well kill each other if nothing diffused their animosity, and I seemed to be the only person in a position to make peace between them.  

But to do that, I needed to talk to them individually; they certainly weren’t willing to speak openly to each other, and even if they did, that would probably start the fight I’d been trying to avoid.  I looked up while I thought and this was when I noticed that Coyote’s posture had changed.  So far he’d walked slightly slouched, hands in his pockets, and a relaxed sort of swing to his hips, now he was tense.  He had his hands at his sides, fingers stretched out, ready to grab a weapon at a moment’s notice.  His steps were measured and silent, each foot carefully noting the ground beneath it.  He held his head slightly low as if he planned to dive for cover, should the need arise.  He stared at something on the hill nearby.  

I followed his gaze.  There was a man.  I barely saw him before he turned and raced back out of sight.  I only knew of one person who lived in this remote area.  If that had been him, I wondered if he recognized me, and if he did, what would he think of seeing me walking this road accompanied by two good-looking armed men, one much younger than I was.  

Coyote stumbled and stood still, halting the rest of us.  Wolf, oblivious to the man’s preceding alert, scowled at him.  “What, is the pace getting to you?”

Coyote didn’t miss a beat with his retort.  “I saw something, you bear-claw.”

Bear-claw?  I mean, it made sense, but pastry-based insults weren’t the profanity I’d expected from him.  He hadn’t stopped until the man was gone, and I’d seen him grimace, but clearly he still refused to admit that in front of Wolf.  Whether or not Wolf knew what a bear-claw was, the courier flipped him off.  Luckily, Coyote was still watching the hills and didn’t notice.  

“Come on.”  Wolf stormed off down the road and Coyote followed him immediately.  They paced each other perfectly from that point on because neither would speed up or slow down for the other.  

It was night when we reached Freeside.  Wolf would head to the Wrangler, presumably, and I’d follow him whether he planned to go there or to the Lucky 38, but he knew which I preferred.  Coyote veered towards his house as we passed the Fort and Wolf pretended he didn’t exist.  I waved, “Take care of yourself, Coyote.”

He nodded and gave me that smile that made it so difficult to imagine the guy as a Legion soldier.  “Stay safe, Arcade.”  Coyote headed north, a spring in his step that convinced me that he was feeling better.  Wolf glared after him.  

“What?  Why exactly do you hate him so much?”

“He’s Legion.”  

I frowned.  “He’s _ex_ -Legion.  He never agreed with them and he’s only twenty.”

“Once Legion, always Legion.  Age is no excuse.”

Wolf did tend to see things in very black-and-white terms, and I had to admit that he was hardly forgiving, but he was no idiot and I refused to believe that he lacked the ethics to realize that Coyote’s childhood made him at least _somewhat_ a victim of the Legion.  I halted and returned his scowl.  “Wolf, he was a _kid_.  He told me himself that he’d been forced into it, and he _isn’t_ helping them now.”

That scowl took on an air of suspicion.  “So he says.”

Now I was incredulous.  “Wolf, _I believe him_.  Coyote’s a good person, despite his history, he isn’t working with them anymore.”

He frowned a little more intensely.  “I can’t be sure.  You don’t always seem like you like the NCR…”

“Oh for the love of—!”  I adjusted my glasses and enunciated more clearly than I needed to.  “ _I.  HATE.  The Legion._   Okay?”

He stayed silent, doubt hanging in the low set of his brows.  

“Wolf, I hate the Legion as much as you do!”  

“I highly doubt that.”

I just couldn’t get through to him.  I sighed in exasperation, and then frustration shifted to something dangerously close to pleading.  “What the hell can I do to convince you how much I hate the Legion?”

He thought for a moment, distrust infuriatingly evident in his stare.  “Tomorrow.  We head south, towards the dam.  A few days travel.”

I barely hesitated.  South could mean a lot of things.  I wasn’t exactly thrilled to wander around NCR camps, given my history, and he could be planning anything from a simple visit to see how I acted around NCR soldiers to an assault on Cottonwood Cove, or, for that matter, the Fort itself.  The Legion Fort, not the Old Mormon one.  They really needed to change one of those names.  

Heck, we’d been invited to visit Caesar, even if he’d shot the messenger on sight.  

*        *        *

I went to the Wrangler as soon as I woke the next morning.  I was still full from the deathclaw leg I’d cooked last night (away from Geiger,) and I had plenty of water, but I’d hoped to show Arcade that I really was fine, and if he saw me hanging out here in the early mornings, maybe I’d have a chance to talk to him away from Wolf.  For all I knew, the courier slept in.  Maybe Arcade hung out in the Wrangler for breakfast.  I used to head out into the wastes to watch the sun paint the desert as it rose, but lately I’d been more inclined to sleep until noon, when possible.  I changed my routine completely to stop by the Wrangler.  

I found James cleaning the bar with just a few drunks waiting, half asleep, at the tables.  He waved me over.  

“You know what happened?”

That could just as easily be the prelude to gossip as a genuine question.  “No, what happened?”

He seemed frustrated.  “Shit.  I guess nobody knows.”  At my puzzled stare, he explained, “Arcade’s in the Fort.  _Alone_.  Probably still asleep, this early in the morning.  Folks say the courier cleaned out the Ultra-Lux last night and then vanished into the Lucky 38 drunk off his ass.”

I decided to voice my observations this time.  I wasn’t a spy any longer, now I was just perceptive.  “Sounds like they had a fight.”

“No shit.”  He opened his mouth again, probably to suggest I take the opportunity while I could, but he shut up and pretended we hadn’t spoken when the door opened.  

Wolf bee-lined for the stool beside mine, not even glancing at anyone else.  Subtle as ever, he opened with an accusation.  “Why have you been spying on us?”

The hand I’d been resting my cheek against dropped to the bar with a thud.  “Your deductive abilities astound me.  What _pray-tell_ gave you that idea?”

I could tell from smell as much as sight that he was hungover, and he’d probably just woken up before running to find me.  How he’d found me, I had no idea, maybe he just thought I lived in the Wrangler, it seemed like the sort of thing he’d believe.  Still groggy, and sore where the rifle had hit me, I didn’t actually want to fight him.  Sleep seemed a much better use of my time, and barring that, the admiration of pretty scenery.  

“Hunting deathclaws?” Wolf snapped, “Seriously?  Like I’d ever buy that bullshit story.”

“I wasn’t lying.”

He smacked a hand against the bar.  “Drop the act.  Why the hell were you tracking us out there?”

I rubbed my temples.  I was in no mood to deal with this bastard first thing in the morning.  Live and let live was all well and good until the latter sentiment wasn’t mutual.  And I was rapidly losing the ability to convince myself that he really would be more trouble dead than alive.  Sooner or later I might have to kill him in self-defense.  

“I _like_ it out there.  I had no idea you two—”

“Bullshit!”

I smacked my palm against the bar hard enough to jolt an empty glass beside me.  As it settled back into place, I snapped.  “Believe it or not, I don’t _actually_ find you so fascinating that I have nothing better to do with my life than stalk you across the breadth of the Mojave.  Would you rather I hadn’t happened to be hunting out there and saved both your asses?  Because, yeah, you would have died without me.  Next time you drag my friend into dangerous terrain, take better care of him.”

He smacked the bar just as hard, toppling the glass altogether.  “I’d rather die than owe my life to a Legion dog!  If you’d just stayed out of it—!”

James caught the rolling glass and I was distantly aware of a frantic conversation between him and Francine as I screamed back.  “You would both be dead!”  My voice cracked, rising well beyond the male range and I hoped he hadn’t noticed as I dropped back to the pitch I normally used.  “You fucking bear-claw, grow a brain!  A service rifle?!  You’d need fifty shots, easy, to stop a deathclaw!  _One_ deathclaw!  Let _alone_ fifteen!”

“Legion b—!”  Wolf tried to slug me and I grabbed for my machete at the same time that five people forced us apart.  

Arcade stood between us, blonde hair a little wild, glasses askew, and trying to catch his breath.  He’d clearly just run here from the Fort and probably woken up just before that.  He seemed exceptionally annoyed to be breaking up a fight first thing in the morning and that brought me back to my senses more than anything else.  In the scramble, Arcade, the Garrets, and their bouncers, had been desperate to pry us apart, so when the dust settled, Arcade, who had forced us apart with one hand on each of our chests, remembered my anatomy and quickly released me.  The bouncers had grabbed Wolf, either because they considered him the greater threat or because the Garrets hoped (correctly) that I wouldn’t want to harm them and they didn’t let him go until the courier shrugged them off.  Francine released me when I let go of my machete’s handle and folded my arms incase the cloth binding my chest might have slipped.  James hesitated, one hand on my chest (he noticed my breasts now even if he hadn’t before) but let go at the pointed glance Arcade gave him before focusing back on myself and Wolf.  

“Can you two _please_ stop trying to kill each other?”  He looked between the two of us and turned towards me.  “Why are you even here this early?  You aren’t usually,” he eyed James for verification, “right?”

James nodded and I explained.  I was still annoyed with Wolf, and it showed, but anger had dropped from my tone and now I felt more embarrassed than hostile.  I wanted a glass of water and at least an hour more sleep.  Maybe by some miracle everyone would be too tired to remember any of this.  “I was up early and decided I didn’t feel like walking.”  He frowned slightly and I added, “I usually watch the sun rise from the old highway ramp.”  

*       *       *

I suppose that made sense, and the idea that he’d opted to stay in town rather than go into the wasteland as he usually did suggested that he’d heeded my advice.  If he stopped running off to hunt deathclaws, maybe I could stop fearing that he’d turn up dead the next time I came back from one of Wolf’s missions.  Coyote looked better than I’d expected.  He wore his usual white shirt and jeans and, despite a few rips to the fabric, I couldn’t see so much as a scratch on him.  The blood had scared me yesterday.  Some of it might have been whatever was wrong with him, but most must have been deathclaw blood.  I could hardly believe that he’d survived that unscathed; I barely believed that any of us had survived at all.  

I turned towards Wolf.  

“Why are you here?”

He hadn’t slept in the Wrangler, I knew that much, so either he’d wanted a drink for breakfast or he’d come here specifically looking for Coyote or maybe myself.  The thing was, I’d _told_ him that I’d be waiting in the Fort, so if he’d been trying to find me, he didn’t trust me to tell the truth about even my _location_.  I had to admit, I had a lot of doubt myself, but I didn’t _act_ on it!  I liked to have a little more faith in people.  

Wolf stayed conspicuously silent.  We stared each other down until I gave up.  

“Go.”  I pointed at the door.  “Just wait by the southern gate, and I’ll catch up.  Try not to start any fights, okay?”  

I got a glimpse of his sad-puppy look before he shot Coyote a glare and stormed out.  I sighed and took my usual seat, turning towards Coyote who sat down beside me.  

*        *        *

“What is it between you two?”

I cocked my head.  I hadn’t expected the question.  I was just glad the Garretts hadn’t heard it, or they’d surely clue him in.  I’d rather explain my emotions myself, if I had the chance.  

I shrugged.  “Partly politics.  How are you?”  If he’d actually broken up with Wolf…

He mirrored my head-tilt.  “Why do you ask?”

I could just tell him how I felt.  Or ask directly about the fight.  I chickened out and gestured to his sleeve.  He hadn’t changed his lab coat, and the bloody tears still showed the cuts in his arm.  

He waved his other hand dismissively.  “The cuts are shallow.  I’ll be fine.”

James saved me the trouble of finding a way back to the questions that was really on my mind.  He held a bottle of nuka’ and a bottle of rum and eyed Arcade, who waved away the latter.  Pouring a glass of the former, James bluntly noted, “Rotface was in here last night.  He said you and Wolf had a fight, what happened?”

Arcade sighed.  “I love how the whole town always knows every detail of my personal life.”

“The whole town _is_ your personal life.” James replied bluntly.  

Arcade sat back, mildly hurt.  “Whoa.  It’s yours more so than mine.”

James shrugged, “Okay, more or less.  But every guy in town has a personal interest in your personal life.”  The Legion slept around, but more with slaves than each other.  Whatever my feelings towards Arcade, having two so spectacularly promiscuous friends amused me, even if Arcade had become more monogamous of late and I couldn’t decide which I preferred.  If he’d been with someone other than Wolf, I might have appreciated his happiness and left it at that, Wolf bothered me more than the relationship they were in.  The whole idea of men sleeping around so openly spoke to a freedom lacking in the Legion.  Relationships and sex were private, drinking wasn’t done, and the openness appealed to me as much as the sex.  It was probably a reason I liked the Wrangler so much, beyond the potpourri of scents, most of which I also enjoyed.  Smoke, sex, cola… I didn’t need anything but water to taste the place with just my nose.  

Arcade sipped his cola and I tried not to look as curious as I felt while I waited for his answer.  He’d probably avoid the question.  

He didn’t.  

At length he sighed and looked towards me.  “He thinks you’re still working for the Legion.  I tried to explain, and now he thinks _I_ ’m some sort of Legion sympathizer.”

James scoffed, “Jeez, do you _ever_ talk?  Anyone who’s so much as mentioned the war to you knows how much you hate the Legion.”

Arcade raised his hands in agreement, “Exactly!”  He looked at me, still silent, frowning a little.  I had no idea what to say, so he predicted, “I know, the guy’s a bit… brainwashed, but he’s a good person.  If he can just see the NCR’s propaganda for what it is…”  

I kept my mouth shut and focused on the carvings in the bar.  I wanted to point out how fanatically Wolf trusted the NCR and warn that I didn’t expect him to just give that up.  Besides, the NCR wasn’t too fond of homosexuality, and Wolf still seemed untrustworthy.  But pointing that out felt too hypocritical and I didn’t want Arcade to be unhappy.  Right now, I didn’t feel like I had any right to try to steer his relationship, I was too biased.  Romantically, if he was happy with Wolf, I had no right to destroy that, and they had only fought at all because of my past.  I couldn’t argue the courier’s character and I certainly had too little experience in love to criticize that, but I knew combat and thus far neither of them had proven capable enough on their own for me to be comfortable watching Wolf drag Arcade over hill and vale.  Wolf could get himself killed whenever he wanted, but he had no right to take my friend with him to their deaths.  

James and Arcade were looking at me expectantly.  One of them had probably asked me something and I hadn’t heard him.  

“Huh?”

“I said this isn’t your fault,” Arcade repeated, “Wolf’s a fanatic, eventually he would have ended up confronting me one way or another.  Whether or not I had an ex-Legion friend, sooner or later he would have noticed that I don’t exactly applaud the NCR and he would have reacted the same way.”

I nodded, trying to think of some excuse to leave.  Today had been a crappy day, that was enough of an excuse to just go back to bed until tomorrow.  Besides, with nothing better to do, I’d be less bored if I slept until then.  

Arcade finished his drink.  “Well, I should get going before Wolf finds trouble again.”  He stood up and I snapped out of my daze.  

“Be careful out there.”

He eyed me, probably noting the hunch to my shoulders.  I’d already realized that he could tell when I doubled over in pain and not just fatigue, “You be careful.  I don’t need to get back and find out that you dropped dead of whatever it is you’ve been hiding.”

He bid farewell to Garrett and left.  I didn’t see him for over a week.  

I had an idea less than a day after Arcade left.  

I’d realized that I was getting worse, but I guess I was just too stubborn to let that effect me until Arcade had pointed it out.  After he had, I tried to stick closer to Freeside.  I still picked up bighorners and brahmin when I could, doing my best to ensure there weren’t people starving in the streets, but I found my excuse to visit the Followers on an almost daily basis.  The Fiends had long been a problem, and even after Wolf had helped the NCR cut down their leaders, the druggie raiders remained so plentiful that a few hours hunting them down netted me a bag-full of chems.  My reputation as Skye, the hunter, shifted to a reputation as Skye, supplier of medicine.  I had twelve Med-X the first week I brought chems to the Followers and, mostly so I’d have an excuse to stop by every day and see if Arcade had returned, I doled out a portion of my haul every day and hid the rest in my house where Geiger couldn’t get at it.  Julie began to expect my deliveries.  Even though I didn’t associate with most of the Followers all that much, they’d heard of me as Skye and as Coyote, the former from locals who ate the meat I brought in and the latter from Arcade and drunks who talked up my act at the Wrangler.  Most people in Freeside had heard of my late-night exploits a few months back as well, the local kids had a legend about a wolf-man who swooped down on bad guys late at night, they painted me as some kind of dark hero and I wasn’t sure what to think of it.  Julie, to her credit, didn’t believe them.  

For a long time, knowing what I did of Caesar, I had envisioned the Followers as an educated, but military bunch, much like Caesar himself.  Learning more of them from Vulpes, my impression became closer to the truth.  Arcade had given me a different view, and now that I got to know Julie, I wondered how an organization so idealistic could survive in this world.  Pacifists, or at least optimists, helping others so freely in a violent and depressing city, I had to marvel at them.  I hadn’t thought of her in years, but it occurred to me that my sister would have found them very appealing.  And in Freeside, they were all but overwhelmed, even with my help and Wolf’s attempts to clean up the addicts.  

As such, I spent a lot of time waiting for Julie, after I checked around and found no sign of Arcade and before I had delivered the meds for that day.  I didn’t like to leave a box load of chems in the open, in a camp that spent so much time rehabilitating addicts, so I’d just wait and usually spend my time watching the sky and humming old world songs.  Julie mentioned my name, at one point, thinking it had something to do with the reason I watched the clouds and that led to a discussion of my transcendentalist views.  To my surprise, she knew what I was talking about.  I didn’t consider women unintelligent, the way most of the Legion did, although I had no clue how to interact with most of them, but Arcade had proved exceptionally well-read and I hadn’t expected that to be the norm even among the Followers.  I found myself chatting with more than just Julie about old books and philosophy and that led, in turn, to the discovery that I had dropped off the books in Arcade’s tent.  Which led to a whole different set of questions I carefully deflected.  As Skye, the Followers believed that I was a very well-educated  and philanthropic trader and a transcendentalist gay man who slept with, and doted on, Arcade.  They had no idea that ex-Legion singer and vigilante, Coyote, was the same person.  Apparently, Arcade was the only Follower who actually visited the Wrangler.  I was lucky enough not to be recognized by any of the drunks who did while I was there.  

~       ~        ~

Round two of the inevitable fight between myself and the courier occured the night they returned.  I’d had the day off and gone west to hunt more Fiends.  Halfway back, my sickness had caught up with me.  In the heat, I don’t know if I passed out or just fell down, but I bled, and coughed, and threw up, and somehow lost track of where I was.  I tried and couldn’t become a dog again and then regretted trying at all when I saw my sleeve had ripped.  I don’t know if it tore when I’d tried to change or if I’d caught it on something or gotten cut by a Fiend or my own machete.  I collapsed at a farm in Westside and drank from a brahmin trough for at least three minutes until I could think clearly again.  I had blood all down my shirt from a nose bleed I hadn’t noticed and my vision swam until the water worked through my system.  I didn’t move until I felt like I could stand safely and that was the moment I noticed that I’d drawn a crowd.  

“I’m fine.”  I think I cut someone off to say that and I know they asked more questions while I started to walk away.  One of them said something about being a doctor.  I almost listened to him.  What the hell was wrong with me?  Why was my body doing this?  Was this just dehydration?  It couldn’t be.  I’d never felt like this before in all my time wandering the wasteland with Vulpes.  This had to be something new.  

I washed my shirt on the way back to Freeside and had myself reasonably presentable when I brought the drugs into the Fort.  Between passing out and getting lost, I’d arrived late in the evening rather than mid-afternoon, as I usually did.  I waved to the guards, as usual and wandered over to wait by the flag pole.  I didn’t bother looking for Arcade, for once; it was already late, if he’d gotten back today I figured he was probably with Wolf at the Wrangler or the Lucky 38.  I was wrong.  

I had my head down while I waited, rubbing dried blood off my fingernails and listening for the footsteps that would signal Julie’s approach.  If she’d already gone inside, I figured somebody else would come over sooner or later and take the meds off my hands.  When I heard someone walking over, I looked up, my face every inch that of a friendly but exhausted trader.  I froze when I saw Arcade.  

“…hi.”

He gave me a puzzled grin.  “Something tells me you aren’t finally here for treatment.”

I broke into an equally uncertain grin.  “Yeah.  I—”

A doctor I knew in passing stepped out of a tent, saw me, and walked over to pat my shoulder.  “Good to see you, Skye.  Glad you were just running late, some of us got worried when you didn’t show up earlier.”

“Yeah, I got held up a bit.”  I offered the box and he nodded.  

“I can go put those in storage.  Julie’s already asleep.  Thanks, again.”  He took the box and left.  Arcade had a new level of surprise when I looked back towards him.  

“You’re Skye?  Skye, the trader who’s been feeding most of Freeside for…” he thought for a moment, “Well, since about the same time that you got here.  I guess that makes sense.”

I nodded.  “I didn’t come up with the name, people just started calling me Skye.  I kept running into Fiends, so I decided to give the chems to the Followers.”  I hadn’t expected him to be working this late and realized that he hadn’t been.  Looking at him a bit more closely, I saw blood on his lab coat, but not where the deathclaws had cut him before.  He was holding one arm awkwardly against his side.  “Are you okay?”

Arcade waved dismissively.  “I just got grazed by bullet.  I’ll be fine.”  He actively tried to downplay it, probably because he realized that I’d track Wolf down if I found out the courier had nearly gotten him killed.  He must have seen that intention in my suddenly blank stare, because he added, “Coyote, I can handle myself.  It’s not like I’m completely helpless.”  He glanced at the nearly deserted courtyard of the Fort and stepped closer to me anyway so he could speak more softly and avoid being overheard.  “I _want_ to help.  I’m no fan of the NCR, but no offense, I don’t want the Legion running Vegas.  I respect why you won’t get involved, but I’m doing what I can to fight the Legion, and it _is_ dangerous, but it isn’t suicide.  I admit that we can’t— or at least shouldn’t— go fighting packs of deathclaws, but I can handle Legion soldiers.  I’m glad to have the chance to maybe make a difference in all of this.”

I considered him.  He still didn’t look like a soldier.  Even when I’d first met him, I’d wanted to trust him, and I wanted to trust his assertions about this, but despite his size, he had always seemed so harmless to me.  I doubt he could compete with Vulpes, but I had trouble imagining him holding his own against even a few recruits.  I’d saved him from just five NCR soldiers once, although he had been drunk, how could he attest that he’d fare well against the Legion directly?  And he hadn’t escaped unscathed.  I wasn’t positive that Arcade wouldn’t downplay his injuries, but I wanted to believe that he’d been honest about that, at least.  My eyes scanned his side and his arm, trying to determine which bore the wound.  

“How bad is it?”

Arcade shrugged and stretched his arm out, revealing a darker stain of blood on his side.  “I won’t be pitching baseball anytime soon, but it isn’t deep.  A few stims should patch me right up.”  He started back towards his tent.  “I was actually here to do that, if you want to talk inside.  Letting this air out doesn’t seem like the most medically sound treatment.”

I forced half a laugh and followed him, noting the obvious reason he wouldn’t have healed this until now.  “You two ran out of stimpaks.”

Arcade shrugged again, trying to assuage my concern.  He explained as he injected himself and I looked away.  “That wasn’t because of the Legion, that was… unforeseen stupidity.”

“On Wolf’s part, no doubt,” I snapped before I could stop myself.  

“He’s not—!”  He fell silent and remarked more calmly.  “You really don’t like needles, do you?”  

Still staring at the blank wall of the tent I nodded.  He moved something behind me and then assured me, “It’s okay, no stims visible anymore.”  I turned around, still pale and a little queasy.  “Is that why you won’t come in for treatment?”

I shook my head and then stopped and admitted, “Partly.”

“You know, I could…”  My expression showed quite clearly that I was not comfortable being diagnosed right now, especially after the stimpak.  He sighed.  “Fine, it’s your fune…”  He stopped himself and scowled.  “Just don’t die, alright?  If this is more than dehydration or heat exhaustion, please go see a doctor.  If you don’t want me examining you because we’re friends, fine, but don’t get yourself killed over—”  

I sighed back.  “It’s not that.”

“Then what is it?  Coyote, something is clearly wrong with you—”

“My name is Zion.”

He stopped and tilted his head, not sure he’d heard me.  “Huh?”

“My name is Zion.  Coyote is… it’s like… a surname, I suppose.  Call me Zion.”

“Zion.  Biblical or like the park?”

“Either.”  I shrugged, “I suppose it must be biblical, my mother… my mother wasn’t from this side of the continent.”

He nodded, accepting that.  “Why call yourself Coyote?”

“It’s formal,” I explained, “My tribe…  It’s our name.  We call ourselves Coyote, but we have personal names as well.”  I hesitated and then added, “I would prefer if no one else knew mine.”

“Why?”

“Because our personal names are not for… are not used among strangers.”

He seemed to realize that this was a gesture of trust.  He nodded again.  “Okay.”  He took off his lab coat and examined the stains and tears, presumably making sure it could be mended.  “Wolf isn’t really that bad,” he assured me after a while, “you just bring out the worst in him.  They guy doesn’t know when to back down and for some reason he’s developed a personal need to outdo you.”

I wanted to say that I hadn’t been trying to challenge him, but that wasn’t entirely honest.  “He’s reckless,” I pointed out, “he may have been lucky enough to survive thus far, but…” 

Arcade watched me warily, his stare conveying either a warning or a plea.  

“I don’t plan to kill him.”

“Please, try to… avoid each other.  He’s… sort of determined.”

I couldn’t help but scoff.  “He survived a shot to the head, crossed the Mojave, and got a gun into a casino just to kill the last person who pissed him off, determined is an understatement.”  Seeing his concern, I swallowed my anger and hid my emotions as best as I could, but I spoke honestly.  “I planned to avoid him.  If I see him, I keep my distance, but I can’t avoid the Wrangler and more importantly, I’m not willing to completely avoid you just because of him.  I won’t provoke him and I won’t seek him out, and I don’t even _want_ to fight him, but sooner or later a man like that _will_ bite off more than he can chew.  He’s going to get himself killed and all I ask is that you don’t share that fate.  Be careful.”

“Says the guy who won’t let me diagnose his mystery-fainting.”  He sighed and sat down on a cot, taking off his shirt to bandage the wound that was already healing.  He really had just been grazed.  

I sighed back.  He had a point.  And my symptoms had been getting worse, even to the point of making everyday life uncomfortable and dangerous, or rather more dangerous and uncomfortable than it usually was.  

“Fine.”

Arcade looked up.  “Fine?”

“Tomorrow,” I promised, “I’ll be back tomorrow, assuming Garrett will give me the time off.  You can figure out what’s wrong with me then.”  I stopped when he stayed silent.  I’d planned to leave and avoid getting distracted by seeing him shirtless, but his silence left me curious and I looked.  “Is that alright?”

Evidently, Arcade had just been surprised.  He nodded.  “Yeah.  I’ll be here tomorrow, I’m not sure about the day after that.  I want to give this scrape a day, at least, to heal.”  

I hated the idea of letting him examine me.  It wasn’t just the weakness of being ill, and vulnerable, and letting that physical weakness be known to another, it was also the idea of letting him see me.  So much of my pain erupted from my chest and belly, not the breasts themselves, but the core, the space between and beneath them, and a spot in and above my hips, presumably my stomach.  I knew so little about medicine, but I did not expect that he would simply look or even feel through my clothes.  He would need to see me naked, or at least partly nude, to figure out what was wrong.  He would ask questions I would not want to answer, and I would need to answer honestly.  I can’t say I was eager to be touched either.  I may have gotten used to handshakes and pats on the back, but I was not eager to lie still and let myself be poked and prodded.  

I don’t know if I would have felt more comfortable with someone else.  Julie or another doctor might have removed the discomfort of letting a man I felt attracted to examine the body that felt like an ugly costume I could never remove.  Even the idea of Arcade seeing or touching the parts I did not wish to shed brought a level of fear and awkwardness; it was probably for the best that I hadn’t had the chance to tell him how I felt.  If we had begun a relationship, I would probably have been too uncomfortable with myself to let anything happen.  Even if he would have been alright with my anatomy, I was not.  

Putting aside my interest in the man, a stranger would likely be worse.  The idea of Julie or some other doctor touching my body unnerved me to the point that I feared I might flee or attack, if put in such a situation.  Arcade, at least, could be trusted.  If I could just think of something else, maybe I could distance myself enough that I would be able to relax and let him cure whatever had been making me so ill.  I didn’t expect that he’d be able to, but at this point, if I continued to get worse, I would be dead within the month.  

I planned to leave, but found my feet locked in place.  My eyes took in his body.  With a shirt and lab coat, he appeared almost ordinary, but those clothes concealed a much more muscular figure than I had really expected.  I’d noticed the forms sometimes when he’d moved, so I’d known his physique for a long time, but had never seen it clearly until now.  He had the build of a soldier, even if he lacked the training and mindset.  For once, I felt the smallest twinge of gratitude for my female shape and its thankful lack of awkward boners.  

The crimson line beneath his arm felt like a gash on my heart.  

Arcade stopped cleaning the cut to look back up at me.  “Are you alright?”

I think I blushed.  “Yes.  Fine.  Sorry.”  Embarrassment settled like a snowbank in my gut and I mentally cursed myself as I turned on my heel and shuffled away.  I couldn’t keep doing this.  Stuck with this body, and sick, and still not entirely sure what I even planned to do with myself, I was in no position to have any kind of romantic relationship.  Once I got my life under control, maybe that would change.  In the meantime, I couldn’t just sit by and watch Arcade risk his life practically every day and pretend that I wasn’t tearing myself apart trying not to worry.  I couldn’t pretend he was safe, and I couldn’t pretend that I could deal with the fear of losing the only close friend I had right now, and I _certainly_ couldn’t pretend that, sooner or later, I wasn’t bound to run into Wolf again and face a fight that would leave at least one of us dead.  

Walking to the Wrangler to talk to James and tell him I’d be taking tomorrow off, that snowbank in my stomach melted to hot acid and I stumbled against a wall as my gut violently rejected what little I’d eaten today.  When the muscles finally grew still, it felt as if my insides had tried to escape and torn free.  I dropped backwards into the street and curled on my side until the agony ebbed.  What was this hell?  Would it even be possible to fix me at this point?  

In the dark, the passersby mistook me for the usual drunks and addicts, or maybe just a corpse on the streets.  I didn’t move while I lay there, watching them.  I felt a new stab in my chest and lungs, but it faded fast, leaving just a strange throbbing that also disappeared soon enough.  I could feel hot blood across my face, trailing from my nose, warming my skin in the freezing desert night.  

My vision swam as I sat up and I waited until my eyes stopped watering and I felt less dizzy to stand.  My legs quivered and my knees nearly buckled, but determination won out and I managed a few shaky steps.  I cleaned my face with a few rough swipes of my hands, probably streaking blood and tears in what might pass for an artistic pattern.  My whole body felt sluggish and the streets seemed to move like shifting ice.  I scraped my shoulders and arms on walls jumping towards me.  I stopped to wait after one such ambush left my elbow bloody.  Everything from my eyes and lungs to my ear canals felt dry and cracked, and I suddenly remembered my canteen.  I hadn’t drained it all day, I kept forgetting I still wore it slung over my back.  I took it out and emptied it in twelve tired gulps.  I felt like I could drink the entirety of Lake Mead.  Thirst had never occurred to me as a symptom, but now I started to wonder.  

It was a good thing that I’d be seeing Arcade tomorrow, although I did worry that I might have already postponed seeing a doctor for too long. 


	9. Dog Fight

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lots of swearing, lots of drunken insults, and a very brutal fight.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Things get a bit disgusting and violent, just to warn you.

The water helped and I felt slightly better when I stomped into the Wrangler.  I didn’t need to intimidate, but I had collapsed too many times and refused to stagger.  Shakiness could still be passed off as swagger if you knew how to move.  Even disoriented, I took in the room in a glance.  Francine had already gone to bed, the place wasn’t busy, and Santiago was well on his way to winning himself another customer as the Garrett’s smooth-talker.  He had a fairly drunk caravan guard smiling and eyeing him hungrily.  Good for him.  

I found myself more focused on a man at the bar, a very familiar man, a very familiar set of broad shoulders, combat armor, and rust-red hair.  Shit.  

I walked up to James without making eye contact and smacked my hands against the counter to disguise the fact that I nearly collapsed again.  “James?  I’m gonna need tomorrow off.”

“No problem.”  End the conversation quickly and don’t ask questions.  Evidently, he had the same hope I did.  I wanted to conclude my business and leave before Wolf opened his mouth.  I didn’t get to the door in time.  

Wolf smacked his own hand on the bar and turned towards me glaring.  “What the hell was that?  You stomp in here like you own the place and slam the bar?  You nearly spilled my drink!”  

He was drunk, very drunk, judging by the smell, and he was lying.  Even falling forward, I hadn’t used enough force to shake his glass, let alone spill it.  I wasn’t planning to deal with him.  I scowled and turned back to the door, but a hand on my wrist halted me.  

“Hey!  Where the hell are you going?  You still think you’re some hotshot Legate or butt-humping asshole?”  I wasn’t even sure how to respond to that drunken insult.  If he was criticizing my sexuality, he was hardly one to talk.  “I outdid you!” he snapped, thumping his beer against the bar.  “I just got back from clearing out Quarry Junction!  What do you say to that, dick-ass?”  

I fervently wished my scowl could force some better vocabulary into his thick skull.  Now he was either picking curse words at random or he truly failed to see the irony of insulting my sexual preferences when he shared them.  I debated the pros and cons of using a hold break to free myself and flip him backwards onto the floor.  “Let me guess, you dragged Arcade with you on this suicide-mission, didn’t you?”

Wolf scoffed.  “Why the hell do you care?  You don’t own him!”

“And you do?”  I stretched my arm to test his grip.  He was holding me tighter than I’d expected.  “I care about him—”

“I know you care about him, you jealous Legion fucker—”  I had no idea if there was a hyphen in that or not.  

“—I just don’t want you getting him killed.”

Wolf either didn’t hear me or didn’t care because he kept talking over me.  “You’re always trying to fuck things up between us.  We’re both happy, so why don’t you fucking scram?  And you should have seen those deathclaws fucking running, we fucking wrecked them!  You bitch-fucking slut, saying we can’t—”

At least that made a nice change of pace from all the homosexual-themed insults.  I shouted my answer too loudly for him to continue drowning me out.  “You _wouldn’t_ have survived fifteen deathclaws in close-quarters at the same time, and if you cleared out Quarry Junction, you got lucky.  Stop trying to best me!  This was never a competition!”

“Fine!” Wolf retorted, digging his nails into my wrist hard enough to break the skin.  He squeezed the bone as well, but my bones were more difficult to break.  “Next time, we’ll find a bigger pack of deathclaws and we’ll just see who can kill the most the fastest!”

“I don’t want to compete with you at all!”  I tore my arm free, resisting the urge to break his wrist in the process, “I don’t think you’re the right person for Arcade, and I don’t trust you, and I don’t like the NCR, but I don’t want to fight you, and I don’t want to start some kind of ridiculous contest killing deathclaws.  You should never have gone to Quarry Junction at all, least of all with Arcade in tow!  Killing deathclaws is not some sort of measurement of manliness or courage!  They shouldn’t have had to die, stop taking stupid risks!”

“Stupid risks?!”  He stood up.  “You’re one to talk!  Hell, weren’t you swearing that you just went out there to hunt deathclaws in the first place?  Fucking ass-bitch-hypocrite!”

“I _hunt_ ,” I explained, ignoring his insult, “as in kill to eat.  One at a time.  Sustainably.  As in, not wiping out whole groups.  I don’t go out there to kill whole packs of them.”

“What?” Wolf snapped, “You’re so protective of Arcade, but screw anyone who actually has to deal with the packs of monsters out there?  They should just be left alone to eat towns and rampage because you’re not hungry?”

“If we exterminated every species that might kill us, we’d be left with an empty planet.”

Wolf spat at my feet.  “Bullshit!  Legion dick-fusker, you killed innocent people all the time, and now you’re playing pacifist and saying you don’t kill vicious beasts?”  

If I hadn’t been fighting the urge to lunge at him, his absurd attempts to insult me would have had me laughing too hard to breathe.  “That isn’t even a word, you fucking bear-claw!”  I grabbed the hilt of my machete but didn’t unsheathe it.  “And you have no idea what I’ve been through.  I have _changed_ , motherfucker, clearly a concept well beyond your grasp!”

He slurred more badly as his fury grew.  It took me a moment to decipher his screaming.  “Legion fuckers don’t change!  S’why I shot that fucking Inculta s’soon as saw him!”

That stopped me in my tracks.  

“What?”

“Fucking Inculta.” Wolf repeated.  “Fucking dick-ass-hole, saw him on the Strip, outside the Tops, n’ put a bullet clean through his head.  Splattered ‘is brains everywhere.”

“…what?”  My voice was quiet.  The bar had gone silent as well.  I noticed the bouncers discreetly ushering everyone into the back, probably to keep them out of the crossfire if a fight broke out, which everyone knew it was going to.  James had disappeared and I don’t know if he’d run to find Arcade himself or if he was just staying out of harm’s way.  

Wolf had the audacity to laugh.  “You fucking stupid?  I said I killed the fucker.  Blew his fucking brains right out!  Bastard cock-humping dick didn’t even see it coming.”  

From a fearful hush, my voice transitioned to a dangerous one.  “I highly doubt that.”

Wolf seemed oblivious.  “What, you know the fucker?  Course you know him, I bet you fucked him.  I bet you fucked him every night, you Legion-loving jealous bitch.”

I froze.  Until now, I’d been pissed, but the pain in my gut and back and the knowledge of how Arcade would react if I gave in to temptation and butchered Wolf right here had stayed my blade.  That one word, more-so than anything that had come before it, snapped my already thin patience.  I squeezed my machete until I could feel the old leather grip compress even further beneath my fingers.  “Anyone ever told you that you look a lot like Lanius?  Except tiny.  Like one of those itty-bitty old world dogs that are cute, but too small to do anything except sit on people’s laps and look pretty.”

“Legion bitch!”

“Lap-candy!”

He swung at me with his rifle, drawing it off his back but not aiming to shoot.  I dodged just in time to avoid the gun barrel flying past my face.  The blade of my machete whistled as I swung it and hit and stuck in the wood of the butt of the rifle, striking Wolf’s hand and severing at least one of his fingers.  

Howling in agony, he dropped the rifle and grabbed a bar stool.  Unable to free my machete, I did the same, both of us now streaming curses and snarls of pain.  I ducked his swing and shoved him backwards into a table, knocking it over and breaking it under his weight.  I misjudged the length of his legs.  Even with the stool as a buffer between us, he kicked and reached my gut.  I collapsed onto the legs of the bar stool on top of him and barely managed not to throw up.  He shoved the stool to the floor and I went with it.  I rolled onto my back in time to see his foot flying towards my face.  Luckily, my years in the Legion let me react before his kick connected.  

I grabbed his ankle and yanked him off balance, toppling Wolf onto the floor and wrestling my way to pin him.  He spat in my face.  I barely restrained my desire to gnaw his nose off.  Instead, I scratched him.  I went for his eyes with both hands, tearing my fingernails into his skin while he spluttered and struggled.  Wolf kneed me in the gut, doubling me over in pain and forcing me off him.  He scrambled backward and pulled himself to his feet beside the stage.  That time I did puke, as much from pain as from the strike.  I felt blood and heat where he’d hit me as well as between my legs and knew he’d done more damage than he realized.  Agony whited out my rational thought and I dove at him, clawing and biting and somehow failing to sink my teeth into his skin.  I got his shirt in my mouth and tore it off of him while he punched wildly and we both struggled to get our knees into the fight.  He broke my nose and almost knocked me off of him with an elbow strike and I kneed him in the balls while I tried to balance.  Wolf doubled over and I brought my knee up again to repay my broken nose in kind.  Head down, he tackled me onto a table, but it fell over beneath our weight and momentum and we both smacked our heads on the floor before rolling to a stop beneath the slot machines.  

He bit my arm and I tore out a fistful of his hair to haul him off of me.  A fist smacked my cheek and I rolled to spit a cracked tooth onto the floor before diving at him again.  One of my nails dug into the corner of his eye and he howled while my other three nails on that hand broke off into his skin.  I tried to bite his nose and his arm shot to my throat, not grabbing but flailing and knocking me back while I struggled to breath.  Wolf was on me, one knee aimed at my ribs and I rolled to the side fast enough that he only cracked a few.  He grabbed my hair and tried to use it to hold me, but I tore free, losing some of my scalp in the process.  

Not really thinking, I punched his jaw as a distraction while I drove my knee towards his gut.  Wolf stomped sideways at the leg supporting my weight and knocked me down.  The force of his kick did something to the knee and I felt the joint pop twice in rapid succession, a sound that echoed through the hushed bar and was immediately followed by a new, mind-numbing wave of agony.  Muscle and willpower got my leg back underneath me, but it refused to move.  I knew I was going to fall, so I grabbed Wolf by the neck and took him with me.  

I cuffed his ear and then I grabbed it.  His hands grabbed for anything they could find, one got my arm and sought my hand, no doubt to break my fingers, but the other managed to slip under my shirt, which had slid up in the chaos, and grab my breast.  My palm struck his jaw so hard that I thought I’d broken his neck.  Wolf smacked backwards into the wall, his head connected with a sickening wet crack and he slumped in a daze.  

I tried to stand and couldn’t, so we both lay where we’d fallen, scowling and gasping for breath.  His face wore a mask of blood and tears and his hair had turned crimson and clumped.  He’d lost his shirt completely, and I could already see a few bruises where I’d struck him, but I’d focused the damage on his face.  If he’d let it go, I’d lost all desire to fight him.  I was in no shape to fight anyway, between my knee’s utter refusal to move and the crippling agony spreading from my gut like the blood that had turned my shirt and jeans more red than white or blue.  

A few cautious faces poked around the corner, noting the silence and watching to see if we’d really calmed down.  

“Are they dead?”

The speaker was a bouncer, who realized his error when my gaze flicked towards him.  

His partner, the other bouncer on shift tonight, corrected him.  “They’re still breathing, you idiot.”

“Somebody, get the Followers!”  

Evidently unable to make his way back through the crowd, James Garrett vaulted the bar and strode towards the door.  “Already headed there.”  His friendship only extended so far and wrecking his bar put a damper on his interest in my well-being.  

I wasn’t letting Arcade see me like this.  

“That won’t be necessary.”  I forced myself to stand, but when I managed it, my knees buckled.  I threw up again, more blood than vomit, and collapsed.  Behind me, Wolf made the same effort with the exact same result.  

James scowled.  “Alright, both of you, out of my bar.”  He nodded to the bouncers, “Watch ‘em until the Followers get here.”  Francine emerged groggily, looking around and glaring at the destruction.  Her brother turned towards her and a bit of congeniality returned to his tone.  “Keep an eye on things while I get Arcade to sort these two lunatics out.”  He stormed off.  

The bouncers clearly felt even less eager to touch us than we felt eager to let them.  I got to my feet successfully just before they grabbed my arms.  They trailed behind me on my way out the door without actually applying any force.  The cool air outside refreshed my lungs and my aching body felt marginally better.  I leaned on a brick wall outside the door, letting the chill sink into my bones until my legs and throbbing gut would let me walk more normally.  

Unlike my relatively effortless eviction, Wolf had to be dragged, snarling and cursing out the door.  He was so drunk, he didn’t stand, he just lay there, still angry but too beaten to do anything about it.  He glared up at me while our bouncer chaperones awkwardly watched and waited.  I didn’t even need to look at them to know that they would be too terrified to stop us if either of us had been able to continue the fight.  After several long minutes, glaring at me futilely, Wolf let his anger drop to a simmer.  He looked away scowling.  “Legion bitch.”

“Oh, shut up.”  The blood soaking my thighs made these jeans feel tight and uncomfortable.  I pulled free of the brick, feeling my bloody clothes and hair sticking to it, and staggered off towards home.  

One of the bouncers piped up weakly, “Hey!”

I didn’t bother to recognize his protest.  


	10. Bleeding

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In the aftermath of the fight, Arcade talks and tends to wounds. We finally learn what's wrong with Zion.

I wasn’t glad to hear that they’d had another fight, but I wasn’t surprised.  Garrett gave me a piece of his mind as we walked back to the Wrangler.  I hadn’t been asleep yet when he’d found me, but after the trek back to Vegas earlier in the day, I was exhausted.  I barely heard his rant about the damage they’d done to his bar , I found myself wondering where this would lead.  This feud was going to leave one of them dead sooner or later, and despite my best efforts, I couldn’t think of any good way to diffuse it.  

“You know this is about you, right?”

Garrett’s question snapped me out of my thoughts.  “Huh?”

“This is about you.”  James waved vaguely towards the bar.  “Those bastards are fighting over you.  Coyote, at least this time, seemed like he didn’t want to start anything, but Wolf provoked him.  He was drunk, and from the sound of it, he got it into his head that he had to show up the singer.”  He shook his head in exasperation and I pinched the bridge of my nose.

“ _Wonderful_.”  I’d already realized Wolf could be the jealous type, but it was always unfounded.  He’d quickly found out that I was hardly chaste and ever since he’d made it a personal challenge to prove himself to me, in that regard.  I hadn’t objected when this meant he tried to be more imaginative in the bedroom or just keep us up all night and I appreciated when he took this as a challenge to be especially romantic.  The guy did things like set up candlelit dinners and surprise me with gifts.  I can’t say I minded that my promiscuous past drove him to go out of his way like that, but it got annoying fast when he acted like I was sleeping with every caravan guard and junkie I spoke to.  He actually asked a sniper in Novac if I’d been sleeping with him.  Okay, the people in Novac did know me a little, but I wasn’t a local, and I’d never even spoken to the guy Wolf confronted, I just kept an eye on him because he looked like a soldier with an itchy trigger finger and I didn’t want him deciding I looked shady.  Evidently, the courier had followed my gaze, because he went over while I was eating lunch and killed whatever dignity I had left in that town.  Frankly, Wolf had been getting more blatantly protective lately, and it wasn’t just in his treatment of any guy around me.  He’d risked his life even more than usual to protect me from legionaries and deathclaws alike.  I guess he must have been taking Coyote’s warnings to heart, but I didn’t want the last hope against the Legion dying on my account.  

Or on his own, for that matter.  

We found Wolf outside, lying on his back in the street, covered in blood and scowling at the stars.  The man had lost his shirt at some point and he was so bloody that I took a second to realize that.  The bouncers watched James approach and followed him back inside while I crouched beside Wolf.  As much as I wanted to make sure he was okay, I also wanted to smack him.  

“What the hell were you thinking?”  I opened the first aid kit I’d brought with me and took out a cotton swab to clean the cuts on his face.  They were scratches.  I realized that when I pulled a fingernail out of his eyebrow.  His nose had been broken as well.  Wolf lay so still that I only knew he was conscious because he was watching me.  He’d blink occasionally, and wipe blood out of his eyes with his left hand before folding his arms back across his chest.  

At length, he mumbled, “Sorry.”

I settled more comfortably onto the pavement beside him, hugging my knees to my chest.  “What happened?  Is this really just politics, like you said, or is it something else?”

He frowned and his eyes flicked over to watch the empty doorway of the next building down the street.  I sighed.  “Wolf, _I’m not sleeping with him._   I’m not sleeping with Coyote, _or_ spying for the Legion, _or_ secretly working for the Brotherhood of Steel.  None of the above.  At all.”  I scowled at his hair as I felt through it for any serious cuts or skull fractures.  He probably had a concussion.  Zion had really done a number on him.  He hadn’t damaged Wolf’s eyes directly, but he’d all but torn out one of the tear ducts and the man had deep scratches absolutely covering his face.  If I didn’t use a stimpak, he might be mistaken for a ghoul.  I realized he was watching me again after I injected him and cleaned his wounds for a few more minutes.  

“Sorry.”  

I meant to look annoyed, but I think the stare I gave him just conveyed exhaustion.  “Wolf, seriously.  You need to trust me sometimes.  Stop being so paranoid.  You actually manage to accuse people I’ve never slept with, and I know that’s a novel concept.  Right now, I’m only with you, but if you keep making an ass of yourself like this…”  

Wolf gave his most apologetic puppy-dog eyes and I looked away.  He didn’t seem like he was dying, so I watched the Freeside lights until I felt something warm and blood-slicked prod my wrist.  I’d been hugging my knees, but Wolf pulled one arm free to hold my hand.  His own hand felt like a slab of meat and I slid out of his grip and lay it on my palm so I could examine it.  His ring finger and pinkie remained unharmed, but his middle and index finger were completely gone, along with some of his palm.  The bone had been crushed, and the flesh had been ripped more so than cut, but it still looked like a machete wound.  A stimpak would accelerate healing and he might even regrow the shattered metacarpals, but his fingers were permanently gone.  Wolf ignored my horror.  

“Sorry.  I know… I know I can really be a jerk sometimes, I just… I just worry.  Ya’ know?”

I sighed.  He was clearly drunk, and probably in pain, and he’d lost a lot of blood.  And I knew it was his fault, but damn he could be charming.  “Just… have some faith, alright?  And whatever this is with Coyote, could you at least try to let it go?  What was it this time?  Garrett claims you provoked him.”

Wolf sat up.  For a moment, he reeled and nearly fell over, but I caught him and steadied him until he could hold himself upright.  He nodded.  “Yeah.”

He didn’t elaborate, so I frowned.  “`Yeah’ only answers one question.”

Wolf flexed his mangled hand, staring at the fingers, but whatever hate he’d had seemed to have finally ebbed and now he just looked weary.  “That Legion… ex-Legion… she really cares about you.”

Really?  This was all just his jealousy?  I sighed and looked him over.  He was bruised, but he didn’t seem like he had any serious injuries except his hand and face.  Coyote had gone for the most painful spots, maybe because he hoped to end the fight quickly.  “I’m sure Coyote would prefer if you referred to him as a guy.”

Wolf looked at me like I was an idiot.  “Why?  She’s a woman.”

I just stared back and then shook my head.  I wasn’t about to explain the intricacies of being transexual to him when he was drunk and injured and we were both this tired.  “What happened?  Where did Coyote go?”

He narrowed his eyes and I scowled at him.  “Look, the other Followers are all asleep and he was already sick, if you left Coyote in worse shape than you’re in now…”

He looked away and seemed to accept that.  “You don’t sleep with women, do you?”

“No,” I answered plainly, “I have no interest in that, whatsoever.”  I knew why he was asking and didn’t care to correct him if it would just get this absurd idea out of his head.  

Wolf nodded.  “Good.”  He got to his feet, losing his balance and propping himself up with a shoulder against the Wrangler’s outer wall.  I stood to follow him, not sure where he was going.  He stood still for a long moment.  “She said I was putting you in danger.”

I nodded in assent.  “He’s a bit overprotective.”  I could see how that might provoke Wolf, without meaning to.  

Wolf looked back at me.  “Why’s she like that?”

I shrugged.  I’d always figured that Zion had some history.  Maybe he’d blamed himself for Inculta’s death, judging from the way he’d reacted when I’d mentioned the man.  Wolf inadvertently affirmed this a second later.  

“I got mad, and I guess I said some things I shouldn’t have.  I told her what we did to that bastard Inculta when we saw him on the Strip, and she flipped out.”  

I groaned.  _I’d_ almost provoked Zion when I’d mentioned Inculta.  If Wolf had brought him up, no wonder his face looked like shredded cheese.  He lapsed into silence for a moment and then mused, “I s’pose the Garrett’s wouldn’t be too happy if we stayed here tonight.”

“No, I really don’t think they’re very pleased with you or Coyote right now.”  

“Then I guess the Lucky 38 it is.”  He started heading that way and I didn’t move.  

“Do you know where Coyote went?  Was he hurt badly?”

Wolf turned back towards me, thought, and then shrugged.  “I wasn’t really looking.  I think she went off that way,” he gestured unknowingly towards Zion’s house.  “She looked fine to me,” Wolf wiggled the remaining fingers of his maimed hand, evidently too drunk and accustomed to pain to be in much agony.  Or he’d self-medicated.  The guy wasn’t an addict, but he did tend to pick up and carry a very large amount of chems, especially med-X.  The man was too stubborn for me to bother reminding him yet again not to mix painkillers and booze.  He turned back towards the Strip and when I didn’t follow right away, he sighed and added, “Arcade, the b— …she’s fine.  We’re both bruised, and I think I sprained her ankle, but she walked away.  I didn’t.  I didn’t even land any good hits, and I lost half my hand.”

Garrett had made it sound like they had both destroyed each other, but I guess both of them had a high tolerance for pain.  I was going to see Zion tomorrow anyway, I might as well let him rest and get some sleep myself.  I started to follow Wolf to the Lucky 38.  

A quiet whistle stopped me in my tracks.  Claws clattered on the street and I turned around to see Geiger, already as tall as I was, standing near the end of the street.  He had a tarp draped over his shoulders, trying to hide his budding horns and glowing eyes and gleaming white skin, all of which were practically a neon sign in the gloom.  Wolf recognized what was unmistakably a deathclaw and swore.  He reached for a gun he didn’t have with a hand that was mostly gone and swore again when the gun wasn’t there and he jabbed the wound against his belt.  

“It’s alright!”  I spoke to Wolf but kept my eyes on Geiger and the deathclaw whistled again in confusion.  Initial fear subsided partly because he kept his distance, but more because I noticed the durable leather and steel gloves that sheathed his namesake.  Apparently aware of the comfort these gloves could bring, Geiger raised his hands and spread his claws.  Or else he was just raising his hands in surrender.  Or it was some kind of threat display.  I hoped the former.  

Luckily, we happened to be alone on this particular street right now.  When Wolf and I just stared at him blankly, Geiger whistled again and retreated hesitantly before stopping to look back.  I got a better view of his leg and saw it had healed completely.  

“You want me to follow you?”

That monstrous face nodded vigorously and he whistled more urgently.  No one had seen a deathclaw around town, even the crazier drunks, and Geiger certainly couldn’t be mistaken for anything else.  He must have been staying in Zion’s house thus far, but now something had driven him to seek help.  Either he’d figured out that I was a doctor and could help Zion, or Zion had sent him to find me directly; neither option suggested my friend was doing well.  And to send a deathclaw rather than wait until morning…  

“Coyote isn’t doing well, is he?”  Geiger nodded and Wolf finally realized what was going on.  

“Well, fuck,” the courier chuckled, “she’s got a pet deathclaw?  Really?”

Geiger cocked his head and I didn’t give him the chance to clarify if he was just confused or if Wolf had magically managed to piss off the one thing in Freeside more dangerous than Zion.  “Geiger, did Coyote send you?”  I started towards Zion’s house and called back to Wolf, “I’ll meet you at the Lucky 38 tonight or tomorrow, I need to be sure he’s okay.”  

“She,” Wolf corrected, but headed off towards the Strip all the same.  Gieger didn’t take the time to answer.  

I found Zion passed out on his rugs.  In the crimson room, I could barely tell what was blood and what was lighting.  He had a lantern on a box against the wall, but it was dim, tinted orange.  Geiger’s gentle glow helped a little as he hovered beside me, watching worriedly.  He whistled, a question, and I understood well enough to reply, “I don’t know if he’s okay, I don’t know how badly he’s hurt yet.”

I took more cotton to wipe his face and figure out what were wounds and what were streaks of drying blood.  He had a broken nose and a nose bleed.  Blood caked in his hair around cuts in his scalp that looked like the skin had been ripped open.  Beneath the blood, his dark skin was only a little less pale than my own, and even though the room held heat like a furnace, he felt cold.  He’d hemorrhaged massively, and his nose and scalp didn’t look bad enough to explain that.  

Geiger hovering over my shoulder gave me better lighting, but certainly didn’t make it easier to think clearly.  In the shadows, with Zion probably hypothermic from blood loss, I couldn’t see him that clearly or risk cooling him off even more by stripping him for examination.   And I really didn’t want to strip my unconscious friend in the first place.  If he didn’t like medical examinations at all, I didn’t expect he’d be happy if I had to do that, especially if it didn’t tell me anything.  An old tip came back to me, something my mother had told me about combat first aid, before I’d even joined the Followers.  It made more sense once I learned human anatomy; combat medics checked five spots first if they suspected hemorrhage, the spots with the largest arteries where people would bleed out the fastest.  I ran my hands along his neck.  Beneath the tendons, every vein and artery stood out, as did his lack of a prominent Adam’s apple.  He wasn’t bleeding there.  I was glad, because neck wounds were incredibly dangerous, but my heart sank for a lot of other reasons.  Armpits were next, and despite my best efforts to avoid his chest, that wasn’t possible given the angle and I didn’t want to turn him onto his back until I knew he wasn’t going to be sick.  He didn’t shave, but he wasn’t bleeding there.  Inner thighs were the last spot to check.  _Upper_ inner thighs.  It had already been nearly a minute and he was still alive, his femoral arteries weren’t severed that high up.  Even if it didn’t get me any closer to saving him, I sighed aloud for having dodged the bullet of having to examine that close to his very female groin.  

My thoughts went to the leg Wolf had mentioned he’d sprained, or maybe bruised.  I didn’t know which leg it was, and he didn’t seem like he’d aspirate, so I rolled Coyote onto his back to compare them.  If the leg injury was serious, that could have severed an artery, causing the blood loss that was killing him and I had to stop the bleeding fast.  

Zion came to as soon as his back hit the rugs.  He coughed violently and rolled over again, curling up on his side until he had his face and arms buried between his knees.  He was shivering so violently that I initially mistook it for a seizure.  He groaned, or maybe he was trying to say something, but his teeth chattered too much to make himself understood.  I ran a hand over his shoulder, as much to warm and comfort him as to feel for injuries.  He was bruised, but his shoulder and arm seemed fine.  “How do you feel?  Is anything unusually warm or numb?”  I had to find where he was bleeding.  I’d nearly given him a stimpak already, but if it was a broken bone, I’d need to realign it first, so it didn’t heal improperly.  

Zion answered in a garbled mix of whimpers and cursing.  I caught the words “pain,” “cold,” and “stomach.”  I tried to roll him onto his back again, hoping to check his gut for signs of internal hemorrhaging, but he grabbed my wrist with a grip that made me yelp.  It felt like he could fracture the bone with his strength, and he might well have been able to.  He’d held his eyes shut, his face locked in a grimace, but now he forced one open and looked up at me, every muscle in his body taut and straining.  Through gritted teeth, he forced himself to be still and hissed.  “No.  Can’t.  Breath.”  He was clearly able to breathe sufficiently now, so I figured he meant on his back.  My fingers traced his spine and moved out along his ribs.  His seventh and eight rib were cracked, but not pushed in far enough to puncture a lung.  He might have a bleed near his diaphragm that would prevent him from breathing while on his back.  Or any manner of other things.  

“Knee.” Zion whispered.  He’d stopped shivering.  It was a mixed blessing, and I found myself more alarmed by the way he’d suddenly relaxed.  His brow still creased in a frown of pain, and his shallow breathing brought flecks of blood to his lips, but he spoke clearly and the fight had gone from his voice.  

“Zion, stay awake.  I know you might feel tired, but you can’t sleep right now, are you still cold?”

“Yeah.”  He panted and closed his eyes.  His muscles relaxed a little.  

“Zion!”

He flinched and a second later I felt the muscles of his side contract massively beneath my hand.  Once again, I thought he was seizing, and then I thought he was heaving, but he did neither.  His eyes had snapped open with the pain and then he squeezed them shut.  A mix of profanity and snarling escaped his bared teeth, hardly any of it recognizably English.  

“How do you feel?”  I asked the first question I could think of just to keep him talking.  Keep him conscious.  Whatever illness he had was probably the cause of the tremors in his gut, and blood loss seemed more like an injury from the fight.  I wanted to believe I’d heard him right and he had some reason to mention his knee.  My hands traced the muscles of his lower thigh and worked their way down, figuring that he’d keep his injured leg on top and lie with the healthy limb underneath him.  I turned out to be right.  

“Numb.” Zion murmured into the rug, “For the moment.  Cold.”  He tried to tug his leg away from me when I first touched it, but the muscle shook and it just twitched towards me.  My fingers glanced over the joint through the blood-caked denim and I knew immediately that something was wrong.  The joint had swollen until the tight fabric constricted it.  Beneath the bruise, I felt the knee cap jutting to the side, well beyond its normal position.  

“What happened to your leg?”

“…Ow.”  He jolted again as another spasm of unrelated pain wracked his body and a suspicion brushed the furthest corners of my mind.  

“Did your knee bend in any direction that it shouldn’t?”  I traced the bulging joint as gently as I could, trying not to acknowledge that most people would be howling in pain right now if this was the injury it seemed to be.  

Zion nodded, grinding his molars against each other as another wave of agony washed over him on the heels of the second tremor.  “Snapped… popped…”  He gestured incoherently.  

“The joint dislocated,” I explained, “It snapped back in, but it didn’t align properly.”  I hesitated, grimacing at him.  “You’ve lost a lot of blood.  You need fluid, ideally blood, but right now your body doesn’t have enough for me to risk giving you anything but a stimpak.  I need to realign your knee, but giving you painkillers will probably stop your heart, so—”  

“Do it.  No…no painkillers.”  I hesitated, but I needed to correct the knee’s position before I could give him a stimpak and heal the rest of his wounds or the knee might mend improperly.  Zion punched the carpet, swearing as nonsensically as Wolf as another wave of pain tore through him.  I had to do it fast and that much pain might distract him from what I was doing.  

I grabbed his foot and used it to rotate his leg back into place quickly and carefully.  Zion yelped, lurched, and stretched out, almost on his stomach, scraping his mangled fingers along the rug and whimpering.  He was lucky, despite everything.  A dislocated knee almost always severed the popliteal artery, or vein, or both, and as it was, I figured the bleed must be here, and the vessel had just been ruptured and not severed.  A ruptured popliteal artery, even if it wasn’t severed, could easily cause him to bleed out.  He’d survived an injury that usually killed, and his leg might even recover.  

I jabbed a stimpak into his calf and injected it very slowly.  “Zion?”

I couldn’t tell if he whimpered or just murmured in response.  

“Do you know how to take your pulse?”  If he’d lost too much blood, injecting the full contents of the needle would stop his heart as surely as painkillers would have, but without a stim, he might well continue to bleed and the medicine would stimulate his body to replenish the blood he’d lost.  

Zion shook his head.  I sighed in frustration.  Geiger shifted behind me.  I’d almost forgotten about the deathclaw in my worry and I flinched when I remembered he was there.  In silent apology, the big creature stooped and crawled over to lie down on a smaller mound of blankets and pelts beside Zion’s own make-shift bed.  

“How…” Zion grimaced for a long moment as his stomach lurched visibly.  When the pain ebbed again, he reiterated, “Did Geiger bring you here?”

I found his pulse in his wrist.  I could barely feel it at all.  But he needed the stimpak.  I just had to hope it wouldn’t kill him.  

I nodded in response and Zion craned his neck to watch the silent deathclaw.  Geiger had shed the tarp and curled up with his limbs and tail beneath him.  He watched us curiously.  “He’s smarter than I expected.”  I couldn’t tell if he said that so flatly because of how weak he felt or because he hadn’t wanted to be found.  

“What happened at the bar?”  Another question spawned by my need to keep him awake.  The stim was almost gone and his pulse had gotten stronger, but less regular.  He might be healing, or he might be about to have a heart attack.  I expected the latter.  

Another wave of pain wracked him followed by another and a third, before the first had really begun to fade.  Zion shuddered and kept shaking with his eyes closed.  This wasn’t his heart.  I couldn’t tell if he was crying.  I set the empty syringe aside and put my hand on his shoulder as calmly as I could manage.  I wasn’t in a panic, but between his pulse and his illness, just looking at him reminded me vividly that he might die at any moment.  Whatever his stubbornness and past, he was a bright light in the wasteland and I didn’t want to lose him.  I’d lost a lot of patients, but if he joined that list it would crush me.  

I didn’t open up.  That was a major criticism my past boyfriends gave me, and I knew they’d been right.  I had a lot of reasons, some more justified than others, but Zion had been one of very few people who really respected that.  I guess it came from his own sordid past and he hadn’t been the most willing to share either.  He’d explained about Vulpes, but nothing else.  He’d only even mentioned what he’d done in the Legion on that one night, and I’d never told him anything about my own history.  I’d poked and prodded for answers almost since I’d met him, as soon as we got comfortable enough with each other that I knew he wouldn’t attack me or run away.  I’d tried to puzzle out his memories and motivations, sometimes quite subtly and sometimes less so.  And Zion, always accepting and observing, despite Legion laws, had just avoided the questions without any hostility what-so-ever.  The memories had hurt, I knew that now.  When he’d finally explained, it had been like he’d carved out his heart to summarize his life, but I still hadn’t told him my own past.  Hell, he probably didn’t even know that despite my dislike of their policies, I’d lived in the NCR almost my whole life.  

I didn’t really want to tell him any of this right now, and I didn’t plan to, it just drove home how much I refused to let him die.  

Lying on his side, those impossibly dark blue eyes flicked up to meet my gaze.  “You’re petting me.”

I’d started stroking his shoulder, absentmindedly.  I noticed and pulled my hand away.  He was lying very still right now; if he was in pain, he didn’t look it.

“Are you feeling better?”

He started to shake his head and stopped abruptly.  I realized that he was too weak or too tired to move even that much.  “A little.”  I felt his pulse again and found it more completely recovered than I’d thought possible.  

Zion began to shut his eyes and I interrupted, “What is it?”  I mostly asked to find out if he had any more glaring injuries.  His ribs and knee would be healing already, I’d need to wait to give him a super stimpak until he replenished some of the blood he’d lost.  They were good, but after somebody loses around half a gallon of blood, the stimpak could change the consistency of the blood too dramatically.  I’d gotten lucky that he’d been able to handle it and that must have stopped the bleeding and fixed most of the damage.  His heartbeat shouldn’t have returned to normal that quickly, but I didn’t want to look a gift horse in the mouth.  

Zion reopened his eyes but kept them narrow.  “I’m tired.”  

“And saving your life wasn’t exactly what I wanted to be doing at two in the morning on a Friday night.”  I’d meant to point out that I was also exhausted, but he’d drawn other conclusions from that, I could tell.  I blushed and corrected, “Sleeping, I mean.  Not that I’m not glad I got here before you bled out.  Not that I plan to hold that over you—”

He laughed and then winced.  “I know.  By this point, we’ve saved each other’s lives often enough that I don’t expect either of us have been keeping score.”  

“Are you still…?”  I trailed off and rephrased, “I’m here now, I might as well figure out what’s been wrong with you all this time.”  Jeez, I was really not good with words when I felt this tired, “I mean—”

Zion’s laugh caught in his throat and became a cough that made the carpet just a little more crimson and forced him to curl up more tightly.  “I know what you mean.”  The humor faded from his eyes and the vulnerable, all but broken man who’d spoken of his past the night I’d met Wolf watched me now.  He answered honestly, “I have pain.  It… what you saw… it was never that bad before.  I got hit in the fight, in the gut, I guess it made things worse.  I’ve been sick, sick in the usual way, but I’ve also been dizzy.  You know I’ve passed out, usually when I stand up.  I might have been dehydrated, I guess.  I was _so_ thirsty earlier, before the fight.”

“Are you thirsty now?”  He needed to drink.  He’d lost a lot of blood, the stimpak would help though.  I dug out one of the water bottles I hadn’t taken out of my bag when I’d grabbed it to follow James.  Zion took it and drained most of it before he spoke more.  

“I’ve felt… weird.  I guess the muscles twitch a lot or something.”

That seemed like the end of his symptoms when he didn’t go on.  “Is the pain anywhere specific?”

He ran a hand along his belly, gesturing to his sternum and lower abdomen.  Heart and… pelvis, I guess.  Kind of.  I’d been thinking abdominal epilepsy, but the more I considered the tremors he’d been having the more I started to realize what they really resembled.  And that would explain cardiovascular problems like bleeding and fainting.  I folded my arms over my legs and frowned at the stitched tear on my sleeve where I’d been scratched a few weeks ago.  

My shock must have showed, because it spread to Coyote and became concern.  “What is it?  Am I dying?”  

The way he said that scared me more than my theory, it was like he expected to die.  Or wanted to.  “Zion, you aren’t dying.  I won’t let that happen.  This…”  I trailed off, trying to find the words to ask if it was possible.  He would know, I suppose.  In theory.  Although maybe he hadn’t noticed, or it wasn’t obvious.  “Is there any chance…”  He watched me wide-eyed, fully alert, and clearly hanging on my answer.  My voice caught in my throat.  In all likelihood, he’d been struck in the gut, probably kicked, because I’d seen Wolf fight, and a slew of other factors made this theory less a hope than a nightmare.  And personally, I’d only delivered this sort of news a handful of times, usually to people who had received it before and treated it like any other disease.  Zion was not one of those.  With what I knew of his views, best case scenario he’d be happy but struggling to survive and worst case… worst case that brilliant smile would never come back.  

“Zion…  Is there any chance you might be pregnant?”


	11. Blessing or a Curse

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WARNING: This chapter gets REALLY dark and deals with some really grim topics, albeit not too explicitly. I don;t plan on bringing them up again, the worse one, at least, is not a main theme of this work or anything, but it is tied to one of the main themes and for a lot of reasons, I felt that it had to be brought up here. (characters being who they are, showing their relationship, and it made sense that it would be mentioned.)  
> I am intentionally vague about both topics, I can add more detail if I'm not clear and if you all think that wouldn't be too graphic (for lack of a better word.) I don't mind violence, but these topics seem more close-to-home and could bother people more easily, I'd think, than even Zion's kind of fight.

Zion lay very still, staring at me for so long that I started to wonder if he’d heard what I’d said.  Studying the shape of his body, it made sense.  I’d thought he’d gained weight, but his limbs and shoulders had become even more wiry and defined; he may have lost muscle mass as well, but he’d lost almost all visible body fat.  He slouched and wore loose clothes, presumably to hide his more feminine parts, so I hadn’t noticed and didn’t expect that anyone else would have either.  Now that I was looking for it, his gut stood out.  He did look pregnant, probably very late term, in which case the symptoms he’d had did not bode well.  The pregnancy must have created or aggravated a heart condition.  And getting kicked could have easily triggered a miscarriage, but the muscle spasms I’d taken to be contractions had stopped.  Pregnancy wasn’t even remotely my area of expertise, and I wracked my brain to figure out what or if there was anything I needed to check right now.  

Zion shook his head, frowning and tearing me out of my thoughts.  “No.  I… I was told it was not possible.”  

“Told by whom?”  If that bastard Inculta had done this and claimed—

“My father.”  He struggled to sit up and settled for propping himself on his elbows.  “My father said that the… the condition our tribe has would prevent this.  That’s why we take in children from elsewhere.”  I returned his thoughtful frown, now less concerned with his pregnancy and more preoccupied with my two very very bad ideas of what might cause his tribe to be infertile.  

“Were you serious when you said that you never got sick?”

He tilted his head, now just a little guarded.  “Why?  Pregnancy would explain what’s been happening to me recently, and it would… it would make a great deal of sense for my father to have lied.”  

I tried not to think too carefully about what he’d just suggested about his tribe.  And he’d asked me directly what I suspected about his health, which wasn’t related to his pregnancy.  Well, not really.  And pregnancy either disproved my theory or it meant that he’d either adapted or healed, neither of which seemed overly likely.  He didn’t spend much time around people and seemed to know how to stay healthy, so I guess he just had a strong immune system.  There were other explanations for not getting sick, and that all assumed he was being completely honest.  After he’d been so secretive about his pregnancy, I wouldn’t put it past him to claim he never got colds either.  

“How long ago did…  About when did this happen?”  

He thought for a long moment.  “Maybe three months?  Maybe eight?”  

“That’s an awfully wide time frame.”

He shrugged.  

“I mean… no offense, but shouldn’t you know with a bit more accuracy?”

“I don’t.”  Either he knew nothing of his own anatomy, which was likely, given the Legion, or he’d continued to bleed, which also seemed fairly possible with his fainting and bleeding now.  But if he was bleeding, and he’d just been kicked in the gut…

“Did the fight…”  I grimaced and rephrased, “If Wolf kicked you, did you… were there any bleeds that you knew about?”

He snorted, intending to laugh and dislodging dried blood from his nose.  He wiped it clean on a crimson wrist.  “Arcade, I’m covered in blood, there were a lot of bleeds I knew about.”  He looked over at his bed and struggled to get up.  

I stopped him to help.  “You need to let your leg heal, at the very least.  You shouldn’t put weight on it for a day or more, until your body recovers enough to handle a super stimpak.  

“I’m fi—”  He fell silent at the doubtful stare I gave him and laughed.  He was clearly feeling better, though when I put my arm around his back to help him over to his bed, I felt how weakly he struggled to support his own weight.  His body had to be exhausted, which wasn’t surprising between blood loss and what had probably been false labor.  If he’d just told me earlier and let me help him…  He still would have probably ended up in the same fight, and I doubt he would have told anyone he was pregnant, least of all Wolf.  But if I’d known, and heard they’d fought…  I sighed aloud as I sat down on the mound of fluff which served as his bed, still supporting his back and letting him lean against me as he caught his breath.  If I’d known Zion was pregnant and discovered that Wolf had fought with him, even if I’d known for a fact that Wolf knew nothing of the pregnancy, I might have killed him.  I would certainly have punched him and Wolf being Wolf, he would have probably punched back.  Knowing this now, I just felt sick knowing what my boyfriend had unknowingly done.  

Zion frowned at his belly, running a hand along it very carefully.  “There was a bleed, probably the sort of bleed you’re worried about.   There were other bleeds, before, but more after.  There was… there was blood, after the fight.  A lot of it.”  I frowned at him.  I’d already realized that Zion felt as uncomfortable with his biological sex as I did and pregnancy probably made him even less comfortable discussing that.  He didn’t want to put into words what had happened, and I hated to think how he’d handle giving birth.  Or who the father probably was.  In all likelihood, he’d been raped and that had to make things even worse.  If he had a miscarriage, at least it would be over with, as grim as that sounded.  His symptoms and size made me think he was late term, probably with a very small, undernourished child, but he might have many more months of this, and between how uncomfortable he already was with his body and the idea that the fetus might be the result of rape…  

With all the bleeding, even setting aside the emotional toll, this pregnancy might kill him.  I hated to suggest the thought that had occurred to me, but he might bleed to death if he carried this to term, and the child was probably the result of a rape, and after the fight…  

Zion shivered beside me.  His face became that expressionless mask as he stared at his gut.  He must have learned that stare from Inculta, I realized.  It exemplified cold focus.  Whatever Zion was feeling, he wanted to hide it, that was why he slackened the muscles of his face into a perfect neutrality.  “I _am_ pregnant.”  

He stated it as a fact.  Either he’d realized the signs or he was just coming to terms with the truth out loud.  He’d bled a great deal after the fight, and looking at him more carefully, I saw the stiff, nearly black curtain of denim near his groin.  Blood had soaked almost the entirety of his jeans, and it must have flowed a little more when I’d helped him to his bed, because I could see stains on his swollen knee where his jeans had been mostly clean before.  I checked his pulse again, but it was still strong.  The blood must have been from an earlier bleed and it just hadn’t drained, or blood soaked into his jeans had spread down.  His knee was more of a miracle now; even if he’d just partly ruptured the vein or artery there, either the tight fabric had stopped the bleeding or he hadn’t damaged the major vessels at all, if he had, between the two bleeds, he would be dead.  

Still, a bleed didn’t bode well for his child.  I didn’t have the equipment to scan him or actually see the fetus, but I had a stethoscope.  If the baby… if the fetus was dead, it had to be removed, but even if it was alive…  Zion had more reason than most not to want this.  Thus far, I’d only had to tell Gomorrah prostitutes that they were pregnant and their annoyance had showed me pretty clearly what they planned to do about it.  I didn’t perform that service.  The Followers used to have a doctor who did, and he’d always been fairly jaded, but I guess he just served one too many of those women because he’d blown his brains out a few months ago.  I’d been sleeping with him at the time.  

I’d never liked what he’d done for them and he hadn’t either, but we’d both agreed that it was better done safely than by the “professional” the Gomorrah girls went to now.  It wasn’t as if he’d only done that, he’d been a doctor, first and foremost, but none of the other Followers were willing to take on those patients.  Normally, I wasn’t either, but this was different.  At the very least, Zion was my friend, and I couldn’t allow him to resort to the Gomorrah’s back-alley butcher.  Even if he hadn’t had some kind of bleeding condition because of this, he wasn’t likely to survive that nightmare.  

*       *       *

Arcade stared at the wall as if he was watching the Legion army marching on Vegas.  “If you’d want, I could—” he choked on the words, swallowed, and steeled himself.  “I could get rid of it.”

I was too tired to flinch, but bile rose in my throat at the very notion.  Revulsion curled my lips before I could hide it.  “No.”  Whether he’d died in the flood or more recently, the child inside me was probably all that remained of Vulpes.  There was one other possibility, but it seemed unlikely; I’d only begun feeling sick a few months ago.  Though I was hardly an expert on pregnancy.  

I ran a hand over my belly and felt movement.  A million emotions had been warring in my mind since Arcade had realized what it was, and convinced me.  If I hadn’t been so certain that this was not possible, I would have figured it out much sooner.  I should have realized.  I’d thought I was dying, I’d thought I’d eaten something or picked up some kind of parasite, but that wasn’t the case.  

This terrified me.  I had no idea how to raise a child.  I had no idea how I would even keep it alive in the wasteland.  I had no idea if I could even survive giving birth, after everything leading up to that.  I didn’t like being pregnant; I hated the idea that I’d be unable to hide my biological femininity.  I didn’t want the changes those hormones would bring, and I didn’t want to feel any of it, even what wasn’t painful, but I loved the life.  Whoever’s child this was, it deserved life.  Everything deserved life.  I killed because, in this world, killing was necessary, but  if it could be possible, even the most brutal killers deserved a chance to live.  I killed only because it was not possible to protect myself and my own without doing so, but this child would live.  Whatever the circumstances, I wanted it to live.  

*       *       *

Zion was overwhelmed, I could see that, but I saw just as easily the absolute disgust at my suggestion and I sighed aloud.  Really, I was glad.  I hadn’t wanted to do that, and I wouldn’t have done it for anyone else.  

I just sat there for a moment, working through my thoughts and trying to decide what to say or do next.  He’d answered so immediately that now I wasn’t sure if rape had caused this, but I still didn’t know if the fetus had even survived.  I didn’t want to think about the possibility that my boyfriend might have killed the unborn child of one of my very few other friends, but I had to know.  I took out my stethoscope and put it on.  

Lost in his thoughts, Zion hadn’t noticed and he jolted when the cold head of the stethoscope touched his shirt.  The fabric was reasonably thin, but I still couldn’t hear through it.  

“I’m making sure it’s okay,” I explained.  “I can’t hear through the shirt,—”  I’d been about to suggest that he just pull it up to expose his belly, but he took the whole thing off before I had a chance to finish.  My words died in my throat and I swallowed uncomfortably.  I guess he was too worried about the child to wait.  

*      *      *

I slid my shirt off as soon as he asked.  Beneath it, all but the worst of my bruises had already healed and my skin remained almost unharmed.  I could feel my wounds mending, but the healing seemed more sluggish than usual.  I guess my child drew most of my body’s strength to heal itself.  That would explain why I’d felt so tired after the fight.  I still had my breasts bound and the blood had made the shirt uncomfortable to begin with.  Arcade already knew about my female body, and the cloth wrapped around my ribcage kept my chest concealed enough that I didn’t feel too uncomfortable about that.  I was more disturbed by letting him examine my belly.  Pregnancy and its inherent connection to the female body left me feeling even more like I’d been trapped in a form that was not my own, like the frog prince or any manner of folks who pissed off the gods in Greek mythology.  I hated letting him see me in that context.  If I hadn’t been concerned for the child inside me, I would have continued risking my own life to avoid that.  

But putting aside the femininity and my enormous discomfort with my current appearance, I felt more at ease than I’d expected.  I’d trusted Vulpes, and when he was not dealing specifically with my female parts, I had even been glad to let him touch me.  I’d avoided physical contact for years, I’d only gotten used to handshakes since I’d come to live in Vegas, and simple pats on the back still put me on edge.  I would have never let a stranger touch my belly, even Julie would have made me uneasy.  When the icy head of the stethoscope pressed my skin, a shiver ran through me, as much due to the cold as to the contact.  I shivered again when he moved it and the side of his hand brushed against me.  

I had avoided contact, and I still feared it, but I also craved it.  Everyone craved contact, and that didn’t surprise me, it was natural.  As a child, I had slept piled with my pack for warmth, and I still missed the comfort of my family, warm and sleeping, all around me.  The Legion had taught me that touch must be feared.  Before Vulpes, and when we had stopped in camp, any touch from someone else had been pain, and terror, and hate.  Now I had to train myself to accept touch once again.  I was still cold.  I longed for touch, more touch than I received and by that I don’t mean sex.  Simple human contact filled a void I’d kept guarded and empty for too long.  I wanted to be touched, even just as a friend, and not just because I still felt very cold in this house.  The rugs and cloth only did so much to keep out the frigid desert nights.  I couldn’t remember the last time I’d let anyone hug me.  I don’t know if I was ready for more than that right now anyway.  

Arcade frowned and leaned back suddenly.  “…huh.”

“What?”

“There’s more than one heartbeat.”  He eyed my belly and added, “You can’t be more than five months pregnant, at the absolute maximum.”

I sighed and flopped backwards onto the bed for a moment before rolling onto my side when the weight of my children became too painful.  Vulpes had fathered this, the other option was only a bad memory.  

*      *      *

“Uh…”  I considered his reaction as I put away my stethoscope and realized what it probably meant.  “I take it timing changes… things.”  

He nodded.  “How many are there?”

Emotion and exhaustion took a combined toll and I lay down beside him, rolling onto my side to face him.  “I don’t really know.  I heard two heartbeats, possibly three.  There may be more, it’s hard to tell.”  I hesitated and added, “You know, multiple births are kind of… risky.  Tomorrow, I should to use the autodoc in the Fort to make sure everything’s okay.”

Zion nodded.  “I will be there tomorrow.”

Something about the way he said that made me nervous.  I tried to laugh it off.  “Only tomorrow?  Need to find new packs of deathclaws after Wolf’s idiocy?”

He frowned at his bloody fingers and then met my gaze almost sadly.  “They did not need to die.”

This was his transcendentalism, wasn’t it?  They were nature and thus beautiful.  “Last I checked, you also hunted deathclaws, just not as many.”

“I hunt to eat.  I don’t exterminate whole packs.”  

I sighed.  I really didn’t want to get started on the many reasons he and Wolf hated each other.  “Yeah.  What we did was… overzealous, I guess.  But you have to admit, they are dangerous and we can’t exactly relocate them peacefully.”

Zion’s brow creased even more.  “`We’?”

“Wolf sort of dragged me along.”  I hadn’t wanted to tell him about it, but I didn’t want to just blame Wolf for this.  He’d gotten a Gauss rifle god knows where and as a result, I’d probably killed more of the pack than he had.  “I let him navigate and he made a detour through Quarry Junction without telling me until we got there.  I’d have stopped this suicidal idea before we’d arrived, but it’s harder than you might think to figure out where we’re headed going through Hidden Valley at night; I thought we were turning North.  I already gave him a piece of my mind for that.”  

Zion propped himself up on his elbow, suddenly wide awake.  “He took you into Quarry Junction with him?”

“Yes.  Honestly, you might want to stop trying to protect dangerous animals and take better care of yourself, you could have easily died tonight.”

He lay back down and shifted further onto the bed, somehow prying his shoes off his feet.  He looked frustrated.  “I wasn’t saying that to protect the deathclaws.  They didn’t need to die, but…”  He sighed and watched me for a long moment.  “Fighting the Legion is one thing, I understand why you need to do that, but following Wolf into dangerous situations like that…”

I pinched the bridge of my nose.  “Zion, really.  You’re one to talk about dangerous situations.”

“I know.”  He shifted his legs uncomfortably and avoided my gaze. “I just…  I want you to be safe.  I heeded your advice.  I avoided more dangerous areas, but…  I am not accustomed to being idle.  I washed my clothes twice a day for three weeks until I found other ways to keep myself occupied.”

His last statement distracted me from the rest of what he’d said.  “You washed your clothes twice a day?  How?”

He gestured to the southeast.  “There’s some water in an old pipe.  I wouldn’t drink it, but I found some old cleaner that works well on clothes.”  

Between the probably toxic chemicals in the mystery cleaner and the near certainty that whatever water he’d found was both irradiated and contaminated, I wasn’t sure where to begin criticizing his decision.  “You don’t do that anymore, right?”  

He shrugged.  “I only wash my clothes when they need it now.”

I gave him the benefit of the doubt that that was rarely.  He was better off wearing dirty clothes than being covered in chemicals and radiation.  “What do you do now?”

“Sing?”  He shrugged, “I sing, I hunt Fiends, I pick up something to eat when I can, and I sleep.  Mostly sleep.”  

That was probably pregnancy.  Not depression, or some other serious illness.  I thought back over what he’d said to distract myself.  “I want to help Wolf, for a lot of reasons.  True, he does end up in some, admittedly pretty dangerous situations—”

“He’s reckless.”  Zion stated it flatly, without any hint of malice.  He viewed it as fact and I had to agree with him.  “Even if he succeeds, Arcade, sooner or later Wolf is going to get himself killed and I don’t want you with him when that happens.”

“Yeah.  I know.”  I scowled at the ceiling.  “I’m not…  I _can’t_ let Wolf go out there alone.  He’ll get himself killed if left to his own devices, I know that.”

I glanced over and met an almost pleading gaze.  I knew he’d keep worrying about me and now, I guess, he knew that he wasn’t going to talk me out of this.  

“Hey, look on the bright side,” I rolled back onto my side to smile at him, “you won’t have to deal with me constantly telling you to be more careful.”  

In the dim light, I couldn’t tell if he teared up or if his eyes just caught the light especially well.  He still managed a smile.  

I broke eye contact to study the threads in the pre-war sheet beneath us, looking for a change of subject.  Zion had paused to pick dried blood off his fingers when I found one.  

“Do you know who the father is?”

He let his hands drop back onto the blanket and met my gaze.  “It’s Vulpes.”

I didn’t have enough energy right now to adequately hide my disgust.  I rolled onto my back to break eye contact in an effort to hide that.  

“It’s better than the alternative.”

“I highly doubt that.”  

“Trust me.”  

I looked back over at him.  He was scowling at the ceiling, his hips still sideways, but his shoulders almost flat on the bed.  It looked as painful as whatever memories he was clearly dealing with.  In the Legion, I didn’t put anything past them.  Maybe he was right.  

“Vulpes was never that bad,” he explained softly, “at least not to me.  He was… kind.  He viewed the Legion as flawless, the same way Wolf sees the NCR, but he was intelligent, and however ruthless he could be towards his enemies, there was a gentle side to him.”  

I tried not to think how similar he sounded to Wolf.  Maybe this was another reason Zion had been so at odds with my boyfriend.  I stared back at the ceiling, lost in thought.  

“Wolf told me that he killed Vulpes on the Strip.”

He spoke so flatly that I couldn’t be sure how he felt.  I found him frowning at me when I looked his way.  “Yeah?”

“Were you there?”

…I guess it was best to be honest.  I nodded.  Where was he going with this?

Zion held up one arm and gestured to his wrist.  “Did he have a scar?  Around here?  It would be a bite, he was bitten.  By… by a dog.”

I frowned back just as curiously.  “Zion, he was wearing a suit, I didn’t look at the guy’s wrists and I barely recognized him before Wolf— before he was dead.”  I took off my glasses and focused on cleaning them to avoid whatever outraged stare he had to be giving me.  

To my surprise, he sounded very calm.  He voiced his thoughts more for himself than for my benefit.  “I suppose it must have been an imposter.  The Legion might have told Alerio to use his name.  Or brought in someone else.  He did have quite the reputation.”

Putting my glasses back on, I propped myself up on my elbows and frowned over at him.  “You think Inculta’s still alive?”

Zion shook his head.  “No.  He died when I’d thought he did.  I couldn’t save him.”

It clicked.  He really did blame himself for Inculta’s death.  He’d probably had Stockholm Syndrome.  I rolled onto my stomach to see him better.  Zion continued watching the ceiling and frowned thoughtfully.  

“What did you do with the corpse?”

“Inculta’s?”

“The guy using the name, yes.”

I thought back.  “I think a securitron dragged it into Freeside.  They probably dumped it in one of the alleys.”  It was pretty miserable, now that I thought about it, but corpse disposal was hardly a high priority when there were living people dying left and right.  

He lay there in silence for a long time, so long that I stretched out a bit more comfortably and I guess I fell asleep.  

*       *      *

By the time I woke up, my wounds had healed almost completely.  Nails had regrown on my fingers, skin had mended, and my ribs felt whole again.  I had never known an injury that wasn’t gone within a few hours, but my knee still hurt.  It moved better than it had last night, but it ached, deep in the joint.  The blood must not have cleared out yet.  I rubbed my skin clean as much as possible.  Arcade was still asleep beside me and I didn’t want to wake him any more than I wanted to get up.  The bed was soft and even healed, my muscles felt spent, like I’d run for days without rest.  I didn’t even want to roll over, even though my hip and shoulder hurt where my body weighed most heavily against the bed.  

I felt movement in my belly.  Despite what had happened, there was life inside me, beyond my own.  Their father was probably, almost certainly dead, but they survived.  When Wolf had kicked me…  That stupid fight had nearly ended them, nearly ended me as well.  My own stubbornness and aggression had nearly destroyed some of the things I cared for the most.  Maybe everything I cared for most.  If Wolf had been killed, the NCR would almost certainly lose the dam.  He hadn’t been, I knew that much; he must not have even been hurt that badly, or Arcade would have never left his side.  Even if I had won the fight more easily, in truth, I would have lost.  

As it was, I had risked everything I loved just because he’d insulted me.  Wolf had provoked me, and I didn’t trust myself to hold back if it happened again.  I had to avoid him.  And I’d been trying that for a while now without success.  I needed to leave.  

It wasn’t just because of Wolf, it was the Legion, and the NCR, and the dam—in short, the shit-storm closing on Vegas as surely as each new dawn.  I’d need to leave as much for my own safety as for the safety of my children, and even Wolf’s safety, because Arcade wanted Wolf alive and because the NCR needed him alive to stop the Legion.  I’d leave tonight. 


	12. Exodus

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> How the heck do we know Arcade's middle name? Seriously, I spent hours trying to figure it out to no avail, can anyone tell me? Is it his father's name or is that just a rumor, this is driving me crazy.

Slowly drifting out of sleep, I took several minutes to remember where I was.  The room was warmer than the Follower’s camp.  A bit more stuffy.  I smelled blood, the usual stuff I tried not to smell.  Something else smelled kind of like a dog.  I heard breathing, my own and others, and more distantly the caw of a crow or maybe a raven.  I felt fabric that was not my bed, and a bit of some fluffy animal hide beneath my right hand.  Probably a coyote pelt.  Wait.  

Coyote.  

 _Right_.  

I opened my eyes to a tiny rug-filled house cast in a dim red light.  He’d never turned off the lantern.  Coyote lay beside me, awake and a little closer than I would have liked.  My instincts told me to back away, but I didn’t.  This was Zion, and after everything he’d been through emotionally, he probably needed a friend.  He’d probably need me a lot in the next few months, considering he didn’t seem to be close to anyone else.  

I guess he’d been lost in thought.  His eyes came into focus abruptly, meeting my own gaze.  They were dazzling up close.  Even the ocean wasn’t that deep, brilliant shade of blue.  Trying to look away, I saw his nose, no longer broken, and now cleaned enough that I could see the cuts had healed.  That must just be the stimpak.  Some people were more strongly effected by them.  Yeah.  It was totally normal that he’d healed completely overnight just from one stimpak.  It was just really really potent for some reason.  Nothing weird at all.  

Maybe he had an implant, maybe he’d only healed the superficial injuries and they hadn’t been as serious as I’d thought last night.  

He’d said something to me and I hadn’t heard him.  

“What?”

“I said good morning.”

“Oh.  Good Morning.”

Coyote’s gaze traveled up from my eyes, along the locks of hair that had fallen into my face overnight.  He had that peaceful smile like his past had never happened and he was somehow innocent and harmless.  Usually, that smile made me want to stay around him forever, as if somehow that simple happiness could be contagious.  It usually was.  Normally, I found myself smiling back when he looked like that, but now it just made me nervous.  My hair was an absolute mess right now.  

I sat up to brush it back into place, struggling to force the stubborn waves into something that didn’t look like I’d just rolled out of bed.  

Zion sat up beside me.  “Your hair is lovely.”  

“Thanks.”  I scoffed, thinking he was joking.  I didn’t actually look at him.  One particular curl flatly refused to stay out of my face and it was getting very frustrating.  I continued trying to force it into place.  “I work very hard to look like I just jumped out of a vertibird.”

I flinched as he rested a hand on my knee.  “I mean it.”  That smile had quirked slightly, he seemed almost playful.  “It’s like spun gold.  Silver and gold.”  

“Thanks.  I love being reminded that I’m going grey.”

“It’s beautiful.”  I wasn’t the least bit prepared for what he did next.  Zion moved quickly, stretching upwards just a little and wrapping an arm around my back to pull me into a kiss.  His other arm slid up to hug me and I didn’t resist that either.  He pressed his lips against mine very forcefully, but kept them shut at first.  I kissed him back until those lips parted to let the tip of his tongue slip into my mouth.  That brought me back to reality.  

I pushed Zion off of me without thinking.  My palm hit his chest, breaking the kiss and the hug and simultaneously reminding me of Zion’s biology.  Between his voice, his face, and who he was, I often forgot that he had a female body, and finding my hand between his very exposed breasts broke that illusion immediately.  I leapt to my feet and backed up, nearly running into Geiger, who was still asleep in the corner of the room.  Considering the meter-long claws stretched out in front of him, I thanked whatever powers that be that I’d managed to stop in time.  Zion, to his credit, looked just as appalled and grabbed the strip of cloth that had fallen off while he’d slept to wrap his chest again.  

“Sorry about that.”

I couldn’t tell if he meant the kiss or his nudity.  Unnerved by both, I flexed my hand awkwardly and shoved it into my pocket.  “Yeah.  Sorry.”  What the hell had I just done?  I was already in a relationship!  Why had I just let him kiss me like that?  And then I’d basically groped him…  

Wait, why had he kissed me at all?  I mean, Zion probably had more than a little emotional instability right now, considering he was pregnant, but still.  Sitting on the bed, tucking the ends of the cloth into place around his chest, he seemed to be blushing.  I hadn’t even considered it, between the age difference and just the guy’s general attitude, but Wolf might be right.  Zion had been very protective of me, in fact that seemed to be his main reason for his conflict with Wolf.  I’d figured that even if somehow Zion had been interested in me, surely he would have said something before now, but he’d grown up in the Legion and now that I considered his life, it made sense that he might have no experience with initiating romance.  Hell, he might not have any experience romantically at all; his pregnancy was probably the result of rape.  Best case scenario, with the Legion being the way it was, would be that he’d been having sex even more casually than I had been.  If he’d been as unable to deal with boredom when he’d been roaming the Mojave with Inculta, I wouldn’t be too surprised if he’d chosen sex as a way to pass the time.  Although his need to stay occupied sounded more like a coping mechanism for the loss of whatever terrible purpose he’d found working for the Legion.  

I’d heard a lot about Skye, Zion’s trader persona, and all the stories painted him as an innocent, nature-loving man with Zion’s incredibly disarming smile, so I knew he didn’t only smile like that around me.  Honestly, I hadn’t seen any real sign that he’d even found me attractive until now.  There had been a few things, the umbrellas in the drinks, the books he’d written and gathered— it must have taken him a lot of effort to find those, and to write the books.  He _had_ gone out of his way to cheer me up and to thank me, and the gestures stood out, but I hadn’t seen them as attraction, just… gratitude.  I’d saved his life, and some patients did have a tendency to become very attached to their doctors when that happened; considering how defensive he got about his own vulnerabilities, and what he’d been through before I’d saved him, I’d just figured he’d done the same.  Come to think of it, I’d been the first and only person the man had really opened up to since his arrival in Freeside; I don’t think anyone else knew of his relationship to Inculta, or had any real certainty of his Legion past beyond the rumors that he sometimes wore a vexillarius uniform.  Zion had been watching me awkwardly while I thought and after the silence stretched on for nearly a minute, he got up and hobbled to the door.  “Thanks.”  He paused to pull on his white dress shirt before he continued, “You saved my life last night, and I apologize, both that the fight was my fault and for making things awkward just now.  I’ll drop by the Fort in a few hours, there are some things I have to do first.”

He left before I could answer, or even wonder why he’d reverted to the monotone he’d been using when I’d first met him.  This was shaping up to be one hell of a morning.  

I felt eyes upon me and turned around to face a confused stare from Geiger, who was still lying down, luckily, but it struck me how truly enormous the young deathclaw was becoming.  That stare felt like a question.  I raised my hands and backed towards the door.  “Geiger, he’s fine.  He’s not going to injure himself again,” I finished the sentence as I followed Zion outside and discovered that he’d already vanished, “I hope.”

*      *       *

It seemed to be common practice that those who died on the Strip would be disposed of in the ruined building beside the main gate.  From the look of it, most corpses were disintegrated upon arrival, but the presence of a very mangled securitron suggested that at least one had escaped this fate.  The smell of his blood confirmed that Vulpes had been here.  From Wolf’s description, it seemed that he must have shot Vulpes point blank with a rifle, in which case either this was my Vulpes and the infection had taken hold, or the courier suffered from a miraculous case of irony.  As a skinwalker, I could estimate the time it took to heal.  My pregnancy had slowed and even stopped my own healing, but unimpaired, his skull would have mended within the time it took to get him here.  Along with his face and scalp a few minutes afterwards.  Brains seemed to heal more slowly; the tribal elders had claimed that they lost some memories permanently and didn’t regain their mental acuity for a few days after a shot to the head.  Point blank, the bullet would have blasted clean through him, so he should have recovered to full health.  

I sniffed the ground.  His scent was old, at least a week, maybe older.  The way this place remained sheltered from the wind, the air remained stagnant and laden with old smells.  I tracked him to the door and lost the scent.  He would have left.  I hadn’t seen him around, so he must have returned to the Legion.  He’d come here on Legion business, that would explain why he’d approached Wolf.  If he hadn’t sought me out, he probably didn’t think I’d survived.  The flood must have killed many dogs and even more men, and finding them all would not have been possible.  And now, even alive, he may not remember me.  

It was best to leave.  Even if it could be possible to remain in this city, to raise my children with Vulpes and Arcade, the second battle for the dam would force my flight one way or another.  It was better that I leave now to avoid the risk of becoming immobile as the pregnancy progressed.  I returned to my house to pack and get Geiger ready to travel.  

*       *       *

I’d barely gotten to the Fort when Zion showed up.  I’d gone to the Strip to check on Wolf and found him already drunk and sorry for himself.  He’d given himself enough stims to heal as much as he was going to, but his fingers were still gone.  I didn’t like the fact that he’d gotten drunk this early, but I could understand it.  I’d spent over an hour there, trying to comfort him before he’d fallen asleep.  He hadn’t had enough to risk alcohol poisoning, and he hadn’t really slept, so I’d left when he’d fallen asleep.  Since I’d started dating him, he wasn’t really callous, but he didn’t apologize.  If he said something, he usually meant it; he didn’t take back his words, even when they’d been uttered mid-combat and hardly made sense.  And yet his fight with Zion must have bothered him more deeply than I’d realized.  He kept apologizing, telling me he was sorry he’d provoked him, and sorry he’d wrecked the bar, and sorry he hadn’t trusted me in the first place.  Evidently, he had reason not to trust me now, a truth I found difficult to accept.  I liked to think of myself as an honest man and the fact that deep down, I’d not only been willing but had _wanted_ to kiss Zion made me question more about myself than about my relationship to Wolf.  Amid his drunken rambling, I almost told him, but I knew that would just make things worse.  I’d tell him when he sobered up, preferably when he was calm.  Or absurdly happy.  Maybe if the NCR won the dam, that might keep him cheery enough to hear me out without overreacting.  

I could not have been more glad when he dozed off, between my own guilt and his constant blubbering about how sorry he was and how sorry he felt for himself now that he’d lost half a hand.  He’d lost half a hand and Zion might have lost a child, maybe two, or more.  Their feud had cost them both and I lacked the authority to decide whether or not to call them even.  I didn’t expect Wolf to continue the fight, but Zion might just be within his rights to do so.  I didn’t want him to, and I didn’t expect that.  Last night he’d seemed… content.  As brutal as the outcome had been, I think the ex-legionary might have finally gotten his fill of fighting.  There was a novel concept: ex-Legion pacifist.  

Zion limped into the Fort before I even told Julie that I’d be examining him.  He’d cleaned himself up and washed his clothes; the ghost of blue had left his jeans, so I figured the cleaner he’d found must have been or contained bleach.  It would explain the way his clothes had become so pale as to earn him the name Skye in the first place.  With his cuts and bruises mostly healed and his clothes and skin cleaned, the only sign of the fight was his pronounced limp and the way he moved like an old man.  

The moment he opened the wooden doors, all eyes were on him.  I tried not to notice the flutter of my heartbeat when he ignored them to focus on me.  

Zion hobbled towards me, but Julie intercepted him.  

“Skye, what happened?  Were you robbed—?”

He nodded by way of greeting and waved dismissively.  “I’m fine.  It’s been tended to, thank you.”  He stepped around her to continue towards me and Julie raised her eyebrows very slightly, clearly drawing conclusions from that.  Julie was too polite to voice her thoughts; Beatrix, however, was not.  She gave me a double thumbs up, a wide grin, and mouthed, “Way to go, ya’ sly dog!”  I managed a very half-hearted smile in response before shepherding Zion into the room with the Autodoc as quickly as he could move.  He hadn’t missed the camp’s reaction.  I found him suppressing a grin when our eyes met.  

“Sorry,” Zion explained, making an honest attempt to hide his amusement, “I didn’t mean for them to think—”

“They’ve thought that for a while now anyway.”  I gestured to the examination table and he awkwardly climbed into place.  I spent the entire examination frantically trying to forget who I was looking at.  After what had happened, I didn’t trust myself around him, I wasn’t comfortable looking at him like this with my feelings for Wolf and what he’d think nagging the back of my mind.  I also wasn’t comfortable reminding myself that Zion was biologically female; it just disturbed me to think I might be attracted to someone who was still physically a woman.  I knew he was a man, mentally, but the physical attraction was still there, as long as I didn’t actually see beneath his clothes.  He passed well, and I could almost forget the way he was except when I had to look right at it to make sure Zion was healthy.  Zion _and_ his children.  His children with the head of Caesar’s spies.  I couldn’t decide what I found most disturbing about all this.  

To be fair, I don’t think Zion felt any more comfortable than I did.  He stared at whatever happened to be in front of him like a man forcing himself not to be where he was.  When I had to ask him to move or hold still, I always needed to repeat myself before he heard me and his gaze became distant again as soon as he obeyed.  I couldn’t even guess what he imagined to escape this reality, but I didn’t want to ask and risk ruining his illusion.  If he had been raped, it made even more sense for him to hate examinations.  I could understand why he might only be at all comfortable with me, even if I wasn’t comfortable with that arrangement.  

I had to check the scanner ten times when I counted the children growing in his belly.  

I’d only ever met one pair of twins, the Garretts, and their mother had died giving birth to just them.  I’d only heard of three successful births of twins in my entire life, and only six others where either the babies or mother had died.  I’d never seen a pregnancy of twins until Zion, and last night just the idea that he’d be having triplets had seemed like a death sentence.  None of the Followers or anyone I had ever met had heard of any woman even _conceiving_ three or more children, and now here I was and there could be no mistaking the six, distinct fetuses inside Zion.  He was less than four months pregnant, he had to be.  

My shock showed, and Zion worried.  

“Are they hurt?”

“No…”  I explained, giving him the plainest description of the odds of survival, for him as well as for his children, covering any options and possibilities that I could think of.  Zion being Zion, he barely reacted.  

“I can talk to Julie and set you up with a bed in the Fort—” 

“No.”  

I tried not to be too put off by his instant dismissal, and I’d sort of expected it from him.  “Okay.  I can stop by your house, but I might need to send a different doctor some days—”

“No.”

I scowled.  “Zion, you need to rest.  The more you move around, the more likely—”

“I can’t stay in Vegas.”

 _That_ caught me off-guard.  “…what?”

“I can’t stay in Vegas.”  He stood and dressed, wincing when he had to put weight on his bad knee.  I started to protest and he explained, “Soon the Legion will march on the dam and whoever wins, one of those armies is taking Vegas.  The Legion would have me executed.  The NCR might do the same, or I’d be imprisoned indefinitely.  I can’t be here when that happens.  The longer I wait, the worse it would be to travel, right?”

I shrugged.  It was equally bad whether he left now or later.  He’d be risking death as much as miscarriage.  Leaving medical care in his condition, he risked death either way, but I saw his point.  Zion had become stuck between a rock and hard place, as it were, if he stayed, he was surely dead, whether the battle came tomorrow or at the same time as the birth.  He’d be less able to travel the longer he waited, and if he made it somewhere safe and hidden from the Legion and the NCR where he could rest, there was a small chance that he _might_ , by some miracle, survive giving birth.  

Zion thought for a long moment and then added, “Besides, although the war is my main reason, there’s still Wolf.”  

I wasn’t sure what he meant by that.  “I think he learned his lesson.”

Zion smiled but it didn’t reach his eyes.  “I think we both know that wasn’t what I meant.”

“Yeah,” I sighed.  He started towards the door.  “Hey, Zion… try not to die, okay?”

This time, his eyes caught the emotion as well as his lips.  “You too, Arcade.”  He started to turn the doorknob and then froze.  “What’s your middle name?”

“Israel.”  I answered without thinking and then frowned as I realized why he’d probably asked.  “It was my father’s name.”

Zion nodded like that made him reconsider.  “Well, he raised a good man.”

“A-Actually, he didn’t.”  I didn’t need another reason to feel sad right now, so I explained quickly.  “He died when I was young, I barely knew him and I never got over it.”

As ruthless as he could sometimes appear, a deep sorrow settled in his gaze.  “Sorry.”

I brushed it off.  “Old wounds and all that…”

“He would be proud of you.”

I must not have been able to hide how much I doubted that statement.  

“If he was a good man,” Zion clarified, “he would be proud of you.  As dangerous as it is, what you do in your travels with Wolf effects real change, the two of you working together might actually stop the Legion and I’m sorry I didn’t see that sooner.  And your work here also helps people.  You’re making a difference, whether or not you can see it, and any decent man would admire that.”

He was _so_ sincere.  About _all_ of that.  I didn’t know what to say.

Zion turned away from the door and closed the distance between us in two lurching strides.  He hugged me before I realized what he was doing.  

Zion’s arms wrapped around my back and his hands rested on my shoulders.  He snuggled against me so forcefully that we fell against the wall.  He stretched up to breathe something into my ear and dropped back onto his heels while I tried and failed to decipher what he’d said.  He stretched forward, as if about to kiss me, and then stopped.  He dropped his feet back to the ground but didn’t move away.  “Sor—”  

I leaned down to kiss him before he could answer.  I had my tongue in his mouth before he broke the kiss.  

“I can’t keep watching you risk your life anymore than you can accept the risks that I take.  I need to leave.  Today.”  He slid his arms free and stepped back.  

“Where are you going?”

He shrugged.  “There’s a park to the North, I should be safe there, at least for a time.”

I managed a laugh.  “Zion.  Right?”

He nodded.  “Ironically, I suppose.”  He continued, “I don’t plan to live there.  I might head east.  Maybe back to Denver.  Maybe I’ll keep going, find out if Walden Pond still looks as stunning after so many decades.”

“Centuries.”

“Less of those.”  

We both grinned and I broke the silence.  “Good luck, Zion.”

“Good luck, Arcade.”  He walked out and when I followed a few minutes later, he had already disappeared, as he had that morning.  This time I didn’t expect to see him again.  


	13. The Fallout

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After the battle for the dam, some people are left adrift.

After Zion left, things seemed to happen much more quickly.  With his right hand maimed, Wolf had to learn to shoot left handed and he did so surprisingly quickly.  He remained as stubborn as ever, but he stopped drawing conclusions and starting fights before he knew what he was dealing with.  He became more careful, luckily.  We didn’t run into any more packs of deathclaws and he’d watch Legion camps and groups for a few hours or even days before we’d move to attack.  

He came to trust me completely.  I didn’t tell him about Zion, aside from relaying that the ex-frumentari had left Vegas.  Zion was gone, and as much as I wanted to be honest with Wolf, whatever I’d had with Zion was over now.  In the long run, I didn’t want to justify how paranoid and jealous Wolf used to be over the one time it had been warranted.  I didn’t want to think about it, but I knew my friend was probably dead and right now it took all my effort to make sure that Wolf didn’t die as well.  Besides, I had a lot of long nights to think about the two of them.  Whatever I’d felt towards Zion, we hadn’t even had a full day where we’d both known and explored that; that wasn’t really a relationship.  By now, I’d spent months with Wolf, and he’d even convinced me to tell him about my past, although guilt probably made me easier to sway.  I wasn’t the most open guy, but aside from my feelings for Zion, there was nothing I wouldn’t tell Wolf, and at the time, I believed that he was even more open with me.  

On the day of the battle, I didn’t see Wolf until after we’d taken the dam.  I went to find him when word reached the visitor’s center.  _Ding-dong, the witch is dead.  Or massive psychotic Legate, as the case may be._ The NCR soldiers didn’t recognize my armor here and I was lucky, I guess, that none of the rangers approached me.  The veteran rangers would probably know Enclave armor when they saw it, just as they probably recognized that Wolf wore the same.  He had Daisy’s old suit, and I had my father’s.  I thought I might see the rest of the old-timers as I walked towards the camp, but I didn’t make it halfway through the bodies and ash and cracked cement before I saw Wolf rushing towards me.  

He hit me in one of those awkward pat-on-the-back hugs and I tried to hug him back normally before he pulled away.  “What?”

His voice was somber and quiet when he answered.  “I need to talk to you, Arcade.”

“…Okay.”  I knew just from the way he answered that someone was dead.  He’d picked up a lot of friends in the Mojave, but I hadn’t met most of them and I didn’t know them well.  I was the only one who’d joined him here today.  I didn’t know any NCR soldiers or rangers, aside from Wolf himself, the only people I knew on the dam right now were my own family.  He led me to a hill on the western bank, overlooking the smoldering aftermath of the battle.  I didn’t see any crashed vertibirds, at least.  That was a small blessing.  

“Who is it?”

Wolf took off his helmet and rolled it around in his hands, but he knew what I meant.  “It’s all of them.”

My own helmet hid any reaction I had and Wolf amended.  “Well, not Daisy, I guess.  The vertibird flew off, I don’t know where it went.”  Small mercies.  “But the others… the Legion destroyed them.  They gave as good as they got, but there were too many of them.  Johnson and Moreno made it to Lanius.  I don’t think I could have killed him if they hadn’t…”  He cleared his throat and put his helmet back on.  “They’re heroes, Arcade.  The NCR would have lost the dam without them.”  

I guess he had a point…  At least Daisy had made it out alive.  And she’d gotten to fly, probably for the last time.  She’d be devastated by the death of the others, and she knew them better than I did.  But the Legion had been routed; I could see the stragglers running into the distance on the other side of the dam.  These ones had lost all semblance of order, but there must be an army beyond them, fleeing to the East.  Hopefully the Legion would crumble before it could cause too much more suffering.  

I didn’t know where Daisy would go and I wasn’t sure if I’d find her.  The vertibird had a tracker, if it was still working.  If it was, it would have displayed the vital signs of anyone in power armor linked to it.  She’d know Johnson and Moreno were dead, and she might guess the fate of the others.  At least she might know that I’d survived.  She’d probably head back to the bunker and I could find her there.  

I got very quiet for a long time, thinking about Johnson and the others.  Wolf got out of his power armor after a few minutes and sat down, looking out over the dam.  I got out of my own armor to join him.  I don’t know what occupied his thoughts for the hours we sat there, but I was too distracted to wonder about it at the time.  In one fell swoop, I’d lost most of my increasingly tiny family.  Now it was just Daisy and I, assuming she had landed safely.  And Zion had only left a few weeks ago.  I guess it was lucky that Wolf had survived.  Right now, he was pretty much the only person I had left.  

I started to wonder how Freeside had fared when Wolf suddenly stood up.  For once I didn’t feel like talking and after traveling at his side for so long, my limbs moved of their own accord after we both got back into our power armor.  He started down the hill, heading southwest and I trailed behind him.  I had too much on my mind to notice that he didn’t look back at me and the helmet hid his expression.  I still picked up on his confusion when he stopped at the first main road and turned back towards me.  

“Where are you going?”

“What do you mean?” I waited until we stood within a few feet of each other and then stopped.  Wolf stepped back a bit.  “I’m following _you_ , I figured you had some destination in mind, right?”

He tilted his head as much as the armor would allow.  “Arcade, where do you think I’m going?”

I shrugged.  “I hadn’t really thought about that.  The dam is won, I guess there’s probably _something_ left to take care of and improve people’s lives.”

“Yeah.”  He sighed and flexed the remaining fingers of his right hand.  He seemed almost forlorn.  “There probably is, but I’m not the man to fix it.  I’ve done my part.  Arcade, I’m going back to the NCR.”

That didn’t mean what I thought it meant, did it?  I forced a very half-hearted laugh.  “Wolf, the NCR isn’t exactly on speaking terms with me.  Even with what we did at the dam, I’ll probably be executed just for having my father’s armor.”

That helmet gave nothing away.  His voice did.  He sounded almost choked up.  “I know.  I’m going back to the NCR.  Alone.”

“…what?”  This wasn’t happening.  Not now.  Not _again_.

“Arcade, I never planned to stay here.”  He said that so calmly I couldn’t decide who I felt more upset with.  From the very start, I’d known this was a man who could get anything he wanted.  Even if he didn’t seem outright manipulative, I should have known.  I should have realized…  

“This was fun,” Wolf continued, “but that’s all it was.  It’s been great, you’ve been…you’ve been wonderful, but this isn’t my life.”

“`This isn’t your life’?!  What the hell—”

“This was a vacation!  I’m not doing this!  I’ve got a girl back in the NCR.  I was always going to return there and…”  He gestured vaguely towards the sunset.

I shook my head.  “I don’t beleive this!”

Wolf had the audacity to shrug.  “Come on!  What did you expect me to do?  Did you think we’d just… ride off into the sunset or something?”

I didn’t want to admit that he was right.  In my most hopelessly romantic moments, that had been _exactly_ what I’d thought.  I didn’t need to answer for him to scoff.  

“Arcade, that would never have happened.”  He actually tried to sound reasonable.  “Two men?  Together?”  He snorted derisively, “This isn’t the Legion.”

I tried to suppress all the emotion that statement evoked.  “So all this…  This was just—” I tried to wrap my mind around it as I said the awful words, “—a dalliance?”

Wolf nodded half-heartedly.  

“And you’ve got some girl back in the NCR?”  I paced rapidly— an awkward thing to do in power armor— and became more animated as my outrage built.  I added a second question mostly as an afterthought, “Do you love her?”

He shrugged.  “She’s okay.”  I halted mid-step to gape at him incredulously, a gesture that lost almost all effect thanks to the helmet I still wore.  He didn’t catch my meaning and admitted, “She’s nice, but she isn’t you.”

“You’re not going to weasel out of this with flattery.”

“I wasn’t trying to.”

We lapsed into silence as a very curious trading caravan passed by on the road.  The guards and trader gave us wary stares, no doubt confused by the presence of two heavily armed men in power armor arguing in the middle of the desert.  They quickened their pace when we grew quiet to let them pass.  Once they were gone, I tried to force the pain out of my voice to ask, “ _Why?_ ”

“I’m going to marry her when I get back.”

I didn’t want to see what he was getting at, so that raised more questions than it answered.  

Wolf elaborated, “I’m going to live in the NCR.  Under their laws.  I wanted to… to try some things before I went back.  I didn’t think it would become… this.”

“So this was some sort of six-month _bachelor party_??!”

He put a hand on my shoulder and I shrugged it off.  “Arcade—”

“Where do you get off, doing this to me?  You’re just out to have some fun and find out what it’s like on the other side of the fence before you go home and pretend this never happened?  What the hell gives you the right to… to use me like this?!”

He reached for my arm again and I backed away.  

“No.  Wolf, what _ever_ made you think this was alright?!”  I sighed heavily and the anger faded, leaving a bleak emptiness in its wake.  It seemed appropriate that the sun had just dropped below the horizon.  Everyone I was close to had either died or left me.  Somehow, I wasn’t too surprised.  

Wolf finally caught my arm.  “I won’t forget this.  I’ll remember you.  I’ll miss you, Arcade.”

I scowled, yet another gesture he couldn’t see, and shook him off.  “Bye.”

I guess the finality in my tone shut him up.  I stormed off and he headed south, towards the long fifteen.  When the last of my anger faded into bitterness, I paused to glance back.  The courier was still walking south, slowly, dragging his boots as if he was walking to his own funeral.  I might have felt better if that had been the case.  

*       *       *

For the second time in my life, I came to on the banks of the Colorado River.  The battle had been lost.  It was over.  

I added getting shot with a howitzer to the growing list of experiences that I never wanted to repeat and rolled onto my stomach.  I’d been lucky; my body had already healed.  I had aches but no stabs that would suggest embedded shrapnel beneath the muscles and skin.  I knew now why Coyote had feared firearms.  Wounds healed.  Not even a shattered skull could kill us, but a shard of glass or a bullet would fester and stab, and our healing would hide the point of entry.  I had cut more than one bullet out of myself since she had bitten me, and the speed of my healing made surgery difficult, to say the least.  At this moment, however, I felt grateful for it.  

The mud was warm, too soaked with the blood of the dead to be cooled by the water.  I smelled fires still burning upstream, but the sun had set.  The NCR must be celebrating, or burning the dead.  The Legion had gone.  Lanius must be dead.  With his headaches as frequent as they had become, I did not expect that Caesar would survive to flee.  There was a time when I had worshiped the man, but he had proved me wrong.  He was human, and vulnerable.  I had mentioned infecting the army as a hypothetical, careful to conceal the bite on my arm and any hint that I had the means to do so.  Caesar dismissed the idea immediately.  Skinwalkers were a myth, he had claimed, and even if they were not, such an infection would destroy the purity of the Legion.  It was not merely that he had dismissed my suggestion; in the time since I had become what I was now, I had seen him fail to notice the courier’s blatant allegiance to the NCR, ignore his own growing illness, and act less and less rationally.  I had smelled death on him long before it had drawn near.  Now the Legion had lost and both Lanius and Caesar were dead, or soon would be.  

Of the Legion’s leaders, I alone survived, and I had yet to decide if I felt inclined to lead them.  I could run east, perhaps catch up with the broken army and… and what?  The NCR had won, our leaders were dead.  The Legion had lost Caesar’s vision and without it, they would crumble.  I had no overarching goal.  I could manage spies, I could gather intelligence, but to what end?  I knew war, but the Legion was in no shape to wage war anymore.  I did not have a plan for peace, I did not have a goal for the empire, I was not the leader for a wounded civilization.  But Lucius lived.  I realized I did not know that for fact and amended my statement.  Lucius _might_ live.  Lucius was one of the two men I had turned.  

Lucullus had pulled me from the flood six months ago.  The waters had rushed me south and luck had brought the Legion’s raft to the same part of surging river.  I had been unconscious until the next day, when I awoke to find myself beside the Colorado, on a slope of mud twenty feet above the normal banks.  The raft had been beached beside us and Lucullus had saved my life.  

I’d never known the man very well, I had no real friends among the Legion.  I respected Lucius and that was the closest I got to anyone.  I was a leader, and notorious for my cold nature, I could not show weakness and kindness could be easily misinterpreted.  I had treated Minerva well in camp, but I had not showed my affection even to her.  I had thought she was dead when I woke on that shore.  

To repay the debt of my life, I had dared to trust Lucullus with the knowledge of what I had become, and offered to transform him in turn.  The risk was calculated; he would have asked what had happened to my arm whether I told him or not, and he had sustained a deep cut to his leg when he’d hauled the raft ashore over a broken wooden plank.  A cut that deep could become infected, and without access to healing powder, he might well have died before we returned to civilization.  The bite may have saved him.  

Lucullus had survived and, as a cursor, he’d been kept out of the fighting in this battle.  His raft would have facilitated the Legion’s retreat.  Lucius, however, may not have escaped unharmed.  I had confided in him about Minerva after the flood, when I’d believed that she was dead.  At the praetorian’s request, I had passed the infection to him and so he would have survived most normally lethal events.  But in the Legion retreat, he would be a high priority target for NCR snipers.  From a great distance, the bullets could not be guaranteed to pass through his skull cleanly.  Without Lucius, and after the defeat they had suffered, the Legion would crumble in days.  

So where did that leave me?  

Half buried in mud, evidently.  

I had nothing but the clothes on my back and a Legion uniform might as well have been a flashing target now.  I had rarely utilized my new canine form, but it seemed the best disguise for the time being.  Covered in mud, I would pass as a wild coyote, albeit a large one, but when I was clean my fur gleamed pale silver and black.  I was recognizable, but a uniquely colored dog attracted less harmful attention than my human self.  The Legion was likely doomed, and I did not plan to live as a dog any longer than necessary.  I would need somewhere to lie low.  Perhaps by the time things quieted down in the Mojave I would have thought of some better place to go.  It took me several minutes, working my way up the slippery riverbank, to think of a safe place to wait.  I had to avoid the NCR, and populated areas risked drawing attention to myself whatever form I was in.  I needed somewhere remote, secure, and far from NCR camps.  The bunker in the mountains came to mind.  

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know bachelor parties didn’t have the modern connotation until the 80s, but I liked the line too much to change it.


	14. Safe Haven

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In the aftermath of the battle, Arcade and Vulpes seek what sanctuary they can find.

When I stopped at the Followers, I left my armor in my tent and flopped into bed.  After everything that had happened today, I was glad that Freeside, at least, looked mostly unchanged.  I only passed a few bodies in the street and I didn’t see anyone I knew among them.  There were a lot of injured locals in the Fort, but injured wasn’t dead, and in the end, my home was still here.  The NCR would take things over, and it might get better, but it would probably get worse.  At least Freeside had fared better than I’d expected.  

Someone shook me awake before dawn.  My body screamed for more sleep as I sat up and grabbed my glasses to see who loomed over me.  It was Julie.  

“You can’t stay here, Arcade.”

“…what?”  My tired, defeated mind couldn’t process that statement.  I didn’t even notice the tone she was using until she spoke again.  She was talking to me the same way she asked patients to leave when we ran out of beds or the medicine they needed.  It was the same firm voice heavily laden with sorrow and regret.  

“Arcade,” she gestured hopelessly to my armor.  “The NCR is hunting down anyone connected to the Enclave.  I’m sorry, but we can’t let you stay here, it’ll put all the Followers in da—”

I sighed heavily.  “Yeah.  Yeah, it will.  Sorry.”  I stood up to gather the few things I owned.  I still had the box of books Zion had given me.  At least the power armor would make it easier to carry a few more of those.  I couldn’t take them all.  

“I’m sorry,” Julie repeated, pulling me into a hug, “I know this must be difficult for you.  You’ve been a great help, we’ll all miss having you here.”

I smiled more bitterly than I’d meant to.  She was nice, but I wasn’t _that_ popular.  I butted heads with a lot of the Followers and not everyone appreciated my sarcasm.  Half of them just ignored me, and Emily had some kind of vendetta against me.  It was like the woman had dedicated her life to pretending I was invisible.  The Garrets, especially James, might miss me, and I’m sure all the guys I slept with would regret having such a convenient time to have problems diagnosed and treated.  The whole sexual partner aspect made patients a lot more willing to talk about that kind of thing.  Yes, I’d been taking advantage of my access to antibiotics, but antibiotics were what we had in quantity; we couldn’t get enough radiation supplies and had always been even more desperate for med-X, and Fixer.  Besides, we treated so many social diseases that seeking them out just seemed like a good idea, and I hardly disliked the perks.  I’d singlehandedly cured and treated so many men that the other Followers had actually joked about the dramatic reduction of prostitutes coming in to see us.  Since I’d taken up with Wolf, those cases had more than tripled, and I admit I found myself a little disturbed that I’d played such a part in their control.  

Arcade Gannon, Crotch Crusader. 

Not exactly a title I wanted to have.  Mostly, I’d been doing that for sex, because life was bleak and I took my pleasures where I could find them, and when I wasn’t in a relationship and didn’t care who I slept with as long as they were men, it just seemed like a reasonable way to kill two birds with one stone.  Leaving the Followers certainly wouldn’t help my sex life, but that wasn’t my first concern.  Right now it didn’t even make the top thirty.  

Julie was called away to deal with an angry King in another tent during the few minutes it took me to pack.  Between sleep depravation and the emotional bombardment I’d been dealing with today, I didn’t notice I wasn’t alone until I got into my armor.  

James Garrett studied the armor, a bit more openly appreciative than usual.  By some miracle, he didn’t have a scratch on him and I wondered why he was here.  He answered that question before I could ask him or even process enough of the situation to come up with a greeting.  

“Francine took a bullet to the shoulder.  She’ll be fine, the bastard that shot her got a face full of buckshot in return.  I’m just waiting until she’s good to get back to the Wrangler.  Your boyfriend probably saved the town.  If he hadn’t worked out a truce between the Kings and the NCR, things would be a lot worse around here.”  

I nodded, not bothering to correct his assumption that Wolf and I were still together.  

He grinned a bit sadly.  “I heard her kick you out.”

I shoved my five favorite books into the small rucksack before I ran out of room and slung it over my shoulder as I explained, “The Followers are already on thin ice with the NCR, they can’t risk sheltering… anyone.”

He scoffed.  “Bullshit.  You’re the courier’s right hand man, the two of you’ve been saving NCR’s ass for months now.  The way I heard it, the Legion would have won the damn dam without you.”

I wasn’t going to argue with him, even if I didn’t think I’d really made much of a difference.  “Yeah.”  I started to walk away and he followed.  The Followers had been busy when I’d arrived, although it sounded like most people weren’t hurt too badly, there were just a lot of wounded.  Only a few people had seen me arrive, but now that things had calmed down, the sight of somebody in sparking, glowing power armor drew more than a few stares.  I don’t think anyone noticed Garrett trying to talk to me.  

“You’re a god damned hero, those ungrateful pricks have got to see that!  What the hell are they doing?  Can’t Wolf track down that president he saved and work his magic?  Hell, the guy can talk a better pay out of me, I’m sure he can—”

“We broke up.”  The words came out before I’d realized I’d said them.  Garrett stopped in his tracks before jogging to catch up with me.  

“Shit.  Look, I’m sorry, man.  I’d offer to put you up, but…”

“But they’d come after you too.  I know.”  I was already headed towards the Freeside gates.  I didn’t really have anywhere in mind, maybe I’d find a shack somewhere and…  Wait.  What was I thinking?  We had the bunker in the mountains.  Daisy would have probably flown back there anyway.  If she didn’t already know, someone had to tell her about the others.  I could stay in that bunker until we figured something out.  

Garrett kept pace until we reached the gate.  “Hey,” he stopped and I paused to listen.  “Where are you headed?”

I shrugged.  In the long run, I didn’t know, and I didn’t want to mention the bunker.  

“Well, good luck.  You sure as hell helped out around here and you got dealt a real fucked up hand by the NCR.  Maybe you’ll find Coyote, even it that bastard broke my best table.”  

That last statement held me in place a moment longer.  Was it possible that Garrett had actually known how Coyote felt?  He _was_ perceptive.  I hadn’t thought Coyote opened up to anyone else, but maybe he’d confided in his old boss.  Maybe Garrett had the right idea.  

*       *      *

The falling snow melted as I climbed, washing the mud and gore from my fur.  As much as I avoided this form, I had to admit that I appreciated the thick silver pelt and camouflage in the bitterly cold mountains.  The freezing air burned my nose and I relied on sight and memory more than scent.  I had passed a group of soldiers on my way here, but an oddly colored dog did not draw their ire, only their curiosity.  They had noted my presence but had not pursued me when I passed them by.  I had traveled here directly, pausing only to eat and drink.  I had seen no signs of habitation while Minerva and I had sheltered in this bunker, so I presumed that it remained just as untouched and unknown.  I saw no signs of my error even as I drew near to it, descending slightly to the less frigid valley in which it lay.  

In this form, I could sense and avoid wild predators even more easily than when I was human, and I had made it this far with hardly any need to defend myself.  Seeing ahead of me the hill that hid the bunker in a hollow overshadowed by its peak, my aching legs managed a trot.  Maybe it was the memories the place held, or just the safety it had offered, but within sight of the bunker, I let down my guard.  

Ice crunched behind me a split second before searing metal bit into my shoulder.  Years of finely trained instincts had me on my back, rolling my attacker downhill and throwing him off of me.  I found myself between forms without realizing that I had changed.  I found myself facing a ranger, also between forms, his brown uniform hanging loose on canine bone structure and catching grey fur beneath the hems and waistline.  He held a knife, not the standard issue Bowie, but something that looked decorative, possibly custom made.  The serrated blade flashed blindingly in the moonlight and the glow of the snow.  I saw blood on it but failed to notice my pain in the numbing alpine chill.  I did notice the bald and jagged scar along his neck where Coyote had given him that fateful bite.  

The ranger slashed again but I dodged and closed the distance, pinning him while I grabbed for his knife.  Animal instinct augmented combat instinct and our canine jaws lashed out almost independent of our bodies.  I tasted his blood and felt his teeth tearing at my ear and the thick fur of my neck.  His scar thinned the fur of his neck while I retained a thick ruff his bites failed to penetrate.  His arm twisted and jerked, desperate to slip free of my hold and sink his blade into my body, probably my heart, judging by the aim of his ambush.  I made the mistake of dismissing this desperation as a poor warrior’s reliance on a familiar weapon.  I hardly excelled in fighting by mouth, but the ranger, used to dealing with human opponents and already locked in place by my grip, failed to defend from my jaws.  I tore into his neck, felt his windpipe tear open, felt the blood soak my muzzle, and found it all healed when I lifted my head.  His empty hand slipped free and claws scraped my eye, which mended just as fast.  This fight would get us nowhere, I needed a new weapon.  

I had nothing.  I had left my clothes on the riverbank and lost my weapons when the artillery had flung me off the dam.  But the ranger was armed.  

He’d been bitten.  I hadn’t considered the implications, but now I did.  He was a skinwalker, and surely he’d ambushed me with a purpose, he must have realized what I was.  He couldn’t have lived without realizing our regenerative abilities, and yet he sought to kill me with a mere knife?  I noticed heat on my arm, penetrating through the chill that stabbed into my shoulder.  A trickle of blood dribbling through the fur on my bicep.  The wound had not healed.  In fact, it hardly bled at all, the flesh looked burned.  I focused on the ranger with a newfound respect.  Somehow, he had found a weapon that could kill us.  And he had, quite conveniently, brought it to this fight.  

I grabbed for his forearm with both hands, hoping to keep him pinned beneath my weight, but he struck my uninjured shoulder to flip me onto my back.  That blade swung at my chest and I blocked it with my arm.  The metal bit into bone and muscle, pouring steam into the air as flesh crackled and hissed.  I bit for his face and combat instinct backfired, causing him to recoil and loosening his grip on the stuck blade.  My feet connected with his jaw in a kick that knocked him back and raked the knife, agonizingly, along the wound.  The blade caught in the bone and tore free of his hands, firmly anchored in my arm until I wrenched it free.  

With the gleaming blade now in my position, the ranger scrambled to his feet, all gloating hate replaced by fear.  I lunged.  I only needed one strike.  The blade burned through flesh and bone like a thermic lance, stabbing through ribs into his heart as easily as gutting a fish.  I tore the knife from the wound and fought pain and exhaustion to watch until I was sure that he would not recover.  The dagger had killed him instantly.  

So near the bunker, I dared return to human form and took the ranger’s blood-soaked uniform to hide my allegiance as well as make things easier when I inevitably found myself returning to civilization.  I had no idea what civilization that would be.  I hardly had family or friends to return to, even in what remained of the Legion.  I had no reason to go back there, nor any alternative I could think of.  And even if I could find some community to become a part of, what would I do?  Utilizing my primary skills of espionage, sabotage, and combat hardly minimized the risk of being recognized.  Unless I put great distance between myself and the NCR.  The stories Coyote had told me in this bunker had always stuck in my mind and I pondered them while I trudged towards it through the snow.  London sounded fascinating, but that had been across an ocean, hadn’t it?  I had no way to cross that distance.  Nantucket may be interesting, but Coyote had not clearly explained exactly where that was and whales, if they still existed, sounded about as pleasant as gigantic aquatic deathclaws.  Coyote had shared an almost soporific tale of a pond where a man had briefly lived in an effort to get away from civilization.  While that was hardly my intention, the place sounded ideal to avoid unwanted attention and Coyote had told me in great detail where this pond was.  If it remained habitable, I had no doubt that I could find the place, and with no other destinations in mind, I made my decision.  I would rest in the bunker until my wounds healed, and then I would travel east to Walden Pond.  

My shoulder refused to move properly, and as a result my descent into the bunker ended up becoming a controlled fall.  Blood soaked through the sleeve beneath the armor.  My arm was worse.  I had the sleeve pulled up and the glove off with the wound exposed to the air in the hope that the cold might stop the bleeding, which it hadn’t.  The wound itself was mostly cauterized in both cases, but arteries must have been severed and the burn hadn’t closed them off.  I’d already discovered that my body could regenerate blood much quicker now, but thus far I had always healed before bleeding had gone on for any significant length of time.  Now I began to wonder.  Exactly how quickly did my blood replenish?  If I bled at this rate continually, could I bleed out?  I could feel myself getting colder and my thoughts became sluggish.  The frigid air bit into my bones where they had been bared by the knife and I felt the ice inside me like a second stabbing.  How had the knife done this to me?

I stumbled into the bunker confident that it would be empty and safe.  In my weakened state I did not notice the signs for several minutes.  I staggered towards the door with my mind on the blade and my very limited options for medical care and my blurring gaze found it open.  I realized that I had been mistaken.  

Through the open door, I saw the previously mysterious interior of the familiar bunker, a narrow hallway turning sharply to the left and descending.  When I froze in the doorway, the bunker was silent, but I smelled human scents on the air.  My canine senses could distinguish seven fresh scents, two of which I recognized.  The courier had been here.  As had his partner.  I could keenly recall the smell of anyone I had met since I’d been turned, but the other five scents remained unfamiliar to me.  From here, I could only detect one scent fresher than the others, but my foggy memory suggested that I had heard people talking when I’d opened the trapdoor.  The ranger’s heavy boots would have echoed along the metal grate even if the rifle I had taken from him had not clanged against the walls on my climb down the ladder.  

I had to hide, but hiding would not be easy.  There were no side rooms, no doorways, not even any furniture within sight, just one wide hallway and one narrow one.  I grasped for any idea of who might dwell here that the courier would have dealt with them and my sluggish mind came up empty.  Allies of the courier were enemies of the Legion, and thus I did not expect that they would take kindly to my presence.  I pressed myself into the corner between the open bunker door and the monitor on the wall, knife at the ready.  If I was to be killed, trapped out in the open like a brahmin in a pen, I would not go quietly.  

*       *       *

Daisy fell silent when a metallic clang echoed through the quiet bunker.  The tracker in the vertibird hadn’t worked in years, so she hadn’t known if any of us survived.  When I’d arrived, her hug nearly knocked me over, and I was in power armor.  I told her about the others and we cried and eventually that emotion had ebbed and we’d sat down, eating rations on the floor of the bunker and talking about the memories we had.  I guess this was what funerals must have been like pre-war.  When we heard someone in the bunker, both of us were instantly on edge.  Even as exhausted as we were, people with our pasts never really relaxed.  

Daisy didn’t have armor and I did.  I went to investigate while she kept a plasma caster trained on the doorway to the stairs.  Maybe Wolf had been wrong somehow.  Maybe someone else had survived, and they’d made their way back here.  Maybe I’d find Judah, or Johnson, or somebody else back by the monitor, collapsed from some wound or from exhaustion, but alive.  At least that was what I hoped in my quixotic, emotionally devastated state.  

Arriving in the entryway, I saw no one.  And then I noticed the gleam of blood and melted snow on the floor.  This wasn’t a friend.  Maybe a scavenger had wandered inside and left when he’d heard me on the stairs.  I couldn’t exactly sneak under normal circumstances, let alone in power armor on a metal floor.  Maybe a soldier or a ranger had tracked me here.  Or maybe just a Fiend, looking for chems.  Or a Brotherhood recon team.  I tried to prepare for anything while I hesitated in that doorway and I knew I wasn’t ready for half the possibilities when I edged across the threshold and found my plasma defender leveled at the second most pathetic figure I’d seen in a life filled with miserable and helpless patients.  

I saw NCR ranger armor and made assumptions before I recognized the man before me.  

Blood pooled beneath him.  A gash in his armor revealed a chest like a photo in an anatomy text.  Or one of those ancient marble sculptures of naked men wrestling lions and monsters and each other.  He sat very still, breathing heavily; I would have thought he’d bled out already if I couldn’t hear each breath.  He only had one visible wound, a truly nasty cut in his forearm, severing the artery completely and reaching the bone as if somebody had tried and failed to amputate.  A knife dangled in the shaking fingers of that hand.  Clearly, he made every effort to pose a threat, but it was a miracle that his hand could even move; he wouldn’t be able to wield the blade.  His other arm lay behind him, draped over the floor.  I could see a blue tinge to his fingers but couldn’t tell if it was blood loss or hypothermia.  I didn’t see much blood on the floor between the ladder and where he’d collapsed, and his arm wasn’t spurting the way I’d expect from a severed artery.  Either he would be dead within a matter of seconds, or something had slowed the bleeding.  

Not that I wanted to dive to his aid.  Even in the ranger uniform, that face was clearly the same Inculta Wolf had blown away outside the Tops.  Unless he was a twin, something strange was going on.  Hell, if the Legion had chosen an identical twin as their lead terrorist, that wouldn’t surprise me.  Tactically, it was even a sound strategy, although it turned my stomach to imagine more than one of that awful man, whether or not genetics made them identical in personality.  

“Are you planning to stand there and watch me die?”

He spoke softly, but the voice was unmistakable.  This was either a clone, a twin, or the same man.  Nobody could be that similar in looks as well as sound.  But I found it surprisingly difficult to hate him.  He had a knife, but I doubt he could even stand, and he was dying.  Despite the cold and the metal bunker, I found myself vividly reminded of another nearly-dead legionary collapsed against a wall and covered in blood.  A chill traced my spine.  Zion had spoken with Inculta’s voice when we’d first met; he’d perfectly duplicated the high-pitched rumble along with the cold I-commit-atrocities-on-a-daily-basis terror-inducing tone.  Surprisingly, Inculta’s own casual question invoked less fear.  Either he really didn’t care what I planned to do or he was too close to death to fear anything.  

“Why are you here?”

The frumentari recognized my voice, although my power armor hadn’t given away who I was.  He noted with mild surprise, “You are the courier’s lover.”

“ _Ex_ -lover.”  Of course.  Courier’s lover.  I was just the guy he’d decided to fuck, both literally and metaphorically, as it turned out.  No need to actually know who I was, just who I was dating.  Even the Legion knew my personal life.  Wonderful.  

“My condolences.”

That had all the tender sympathy of a crucifixion.  “I am so glad that the head of Caesar’s spies deeply cares about my feelings.  Really.  I’m thrilled to little pieces.”

“If you plan to offer witty banter, I would rather forgo that service.  I clearly pose no threat to you.”

“Yeah.”  I glanced over his wounds again.  On the upside, it was cold enough in the entryway that his limbs might as well be on ice; if the blood vessels could be mended, he might regain the use of his hands.  Not that I really wanted to help him, I hadn’t decided.  I just noted it out of medical curiosity.  He should have bled out by now, but somehow that hadn’t happened.  Maybe this was the same guy who’d gotten his head blasted apart a few weeks ago.  What the hell _was_ he?  “How are you here?”

Even nearly dead, the man was an expert at unamused stares.  “Do you mean because I was shot in the head, because my arms are nearly severed, because I was caught in the blast of an artillery shell at the dam, or are you simply asking how I found you in such a remote location?”

Jeez, what _was_ he?!  I paused to process that statement.  “Wait, _both_ your arms?”

Now he looked almost evasive.  And I had questions I needed answered.  I sighed and shook my head.  If I could have knelt in power armor, I would have.  As it was, I stepped out of it and crouched beside him in my lab coat, shirt, and slacks, the clothes I’d worn almost the entire time I’d been following Wolf through the desert.  “Let me see your arm.”

Inculta offered the exposed wound, holding it out like a dead fish.  The way it dangled lifelessly confirmed that he’d lost the ability to move anything beyond the elbow.  I reached for his right arm instead.  I’d presumed that when he said both arms were nearly severed he’d referred to another brutal forearm gash, but I realized my error when lifting the arm incited a stream of snarled cursing.  It was his shoulder.  I couldn’t see how bad it was beneath the armor, and I didn’t look forward to stripping him even just from the waist up.  I wasn’t interested in that wound right now anyway.  I pulled off the glove and slid up his sleeve, revealing a vividly white scar that practically glowed on his cold and pale skin.  It was a bite, probably a dog bite.  

As agony ebbed, Vulpes studied the realizations and curiosity dawning on my face.  “Who told you of this?  What do you know?”

He sounded on edge, but the man was too near death to really get defensive.  “Coyote told me.”  In the Legion, despite Zoin’s claims, he’d probably treated Zion as disposable.  He might not even remember him or his name.  

“Coyote survived?”

That surprised me.  “Uh, yeah, he thought you were dead.”

Vulpes stared at his knees, processing that.  “She would have had no way to return to the Legion…”  He frowned at me, ignoring my grimace at the idea that Zion would have _wanted_ to rejoin the Legion.  “What became of her?  Do you know where she went?”

“The great Vulpes Inculta doesn’t know what happened to someone?  That’s a novel concept.”  I focused on the wound I could see and gripped his left arm, peeling his frozen fingers off the knife and taking a closer look at the injury.  

He didn’t seem to notice.  “I care for her very deeply,” Vulpes snapped, “I would very much like to know what became of her after my supposed demise.”

“What exactly happened?  Coyote was very convinced that you had died, and the fact that you have the scar suggests that you probably are the man he talked about— unless there’s some bizarre Legion ritual of getting bitten by dogs— but I’ve personally seen your skull blown apart, and even Wolf didn’t survive that deadly an injury.”  His arm had been mostly cauterized, as if he’d been cut by a shish-kebab except the flesh hadn’t blackened.  And his artery had been severed almost completely, and yet he hadn’t passed out from blood loss.  

He frowned at me for a long time while I did my best to mend the nerves and blood vessels.  I was nothing if not obstinate, however, and he gave up, deciding to answer my questions in the hope of hearing what had become of Zion.  “We traveled together in the Legion’s service for many years.  We were partners.  The condition she carries evidently effects a deep sleep while it spreads through the body and she infected me the night we got separated…”  

He trailed off, seeing my confusion.  “You were unaware of her condition?”

“I was aware of one…er… _condition_ , but not something contagious.  What are _you_ talking about?”

“Coyote possesses an… a pathogen that allows her to heal at a greatly accelerated rate and survive many wounds that would normally prove lethal.”  

“And you have that now.”  

He nodded.  It made sense, I’d seen Coyote heal a broken nose and various other cuts and scrapes unnaturally quickly and I’d watched Vulpes get shot in the head, and yet here he was.  He’d survived a severed artery; the blood on the floor below him amounted to around two gallons, so his body had clearly replenished at least half a gallon since he’d been here.  He would have bled out if he wasn’t healing so quickly.  

“The cauterization must have stopped the cells from regenerating.”  I’d mended the artery as best as I could, reconnecting it and letting blood circulate through his hand again, but the muscle and skin couldn’t stretch to cover the open area.  Clearing out the tissue that had been killed by contact with the weapon might trigger his healing abilities, we did the same thing to people with that kind of implant who had been burned, but he’d start bleeding again.  I had no way of knowing how much blood he’d lost or how long his body could continue to heal itself.  If he lost too much blood, he might not be able to recover at all.  Zion’s leg hadn’t healed overnight and yet Vulpes had survived a point-blank gunshot to the head.  Maybe it varied from person to person.  I didn’t expect that this would be a random illness or a mutation.  This must have been engineered.  It might be new Enclave bioengineering, or pre-war, or some mutation of the FEV, but this was beyond a random quirk of genetics. 

“The wound was cauterized…”  I thought he might be delirious, but it seemed he’d just realized that aloud.  

“You didn’t know?  What weapon was used?”  I had a first aid kit and took a scalpel from it.  “I’m going to try to trigger your healing abilities.  This is going to hurt.”  Why did I care how he felt?  I’d spoken out of habit and I regretted it, however helpless the man appeared right now.  

“It was this knife.”  Vulpes nodded to the blade now lying on the floor between us.  I cut into his arm and he gritted his teeth, refusing to openly show the pain he was feeling.  I could see the skin and muscle beginning to regrow as soon as my scalpel broke the skin, I had to work fast to clear away the burned flesh and remove it before the wound sealed again.  The skin of his arm knit seamlessly barely an instant after I pulled out the last of the dead tissue.  

“Holy shit.”  I’d seen a lot of implants, and mutants, and genetically engineered monstrosities, and _nothing_ healed that quickly, except maybe a ghoul inside a nuclear reactor.  No wonder he’d survived everything that had happened to him.  

Vulpes ignored my incredulous stare and nodded at the knife.  “How would that blade be able to stop the healing?”  I didn’t look at the knife just yet.  He seemed to be doing better, but his right arm had turned an even darker blue and the fingers looked completely frozen.  I didn’t exactly love the idea of restoring a legionary to fighting shape, but with a shoulder wound, if the arm died completely, the necrotic tissue or just infection could easily kill him.  I frowned at his arm, reluctant to do more than I had to, but I couldn’t leave him here in this condition, whoever he was.  Vulpes guessed my intention and pulled off his blood-soaked armor.  He turned his back to me, dragging that lifeless arm along the metal floor to present his shoulder.  I grabbed the knife so he wouldn’t cut himself by accident and paused to examine the blade.  

It didn’t look like a weapon, this was a work of art, something more decorative than functional.  The jeweled hilt suggested that the knife had been forged pre-war and preserved somehow, maybe in a vault.  The blade looked like precious metal.  “There’s no heat source or special coating as far as I can tell.”  A metal allergy wouldn’t cauterize flesh; the infection that accelerated healing must somehow change the composition of his body, resulting in an exothermic reaction or just chemical burns on contact with something in the blade.  Probably the metal.  Probably silver.  I summarized my theory as simply as I could while mending his shoulder.  

Vulpes stifled curses for several minutes after the shoulder wound healed.  I could see the blue slowly fading back to pink and knew he had to be feeling pins and needles times a thousand.  I didn’t have Med-X and the pain seemed like just desserts for everything he’d done in service to Caesar.  

It probably helped him that I was so tired and emotionally drained right now.  I was too exhausted to argue against his crimes and the Legion’s policies and I felt too numb to really hate him, despite who he was.  Treating his wounds lulled me into a routine again and I didn’t really care who I was treating, I just appreciated the familiar skills and motions.  

My thoughts wandered back to everything that had happened since the dam had been taken.  I guess, in his own way, Vulpes might be going through some of the same emotions.  The Legion had left in a pretty broken and chaotic state, and yet here he was, on the other side of the Mojave from the dam, wearing NCR armor.  He hadn’t followed the Legion, and I wanted to hope that maybe somehow Zion had gotten through to him and now that the Legion had lost, he might be turning over a new leaf.  According to Zion, the man had been a part of that since he was a kid, and as much as I hated to make the comparison, maybe we were alike.  Granted, _I’d_ left the fascist organization I’d been born into when I’d been a child, if he’d just left the Legion now, it would certainly have left a stronger impression.  He’d done a lot of awful things himself, and should be held accountable, but if he at least recognized his mistakes, he might be able to redeem himself.  He was young, now that I got a good look at him, I guessed that he and Zion had been the same age.  He probably felt that he’d lost everything, the same way I had felt earlier and the way I’d felt as a kid when Navarro fell.  

People usually sought out whatever they had left when that happened.  When I’d been a kid, I’d become even more attached to my mother and the few people we had left; after the dam, I’d sought out Daisy and at least she was still alive and with me.  Why had he trekked, presumably from the dam, all the way out here?  

I opened my mouth to ask, but he spoke first.  “Where is Coyote?”

I paused.  Obviously, this was the Vulpes Zion had known, and the man who had fathered his child, but this was still Vulpes Inculta, and Zion, whatever he felt towards Vulpes, was a vulnerable, educated transcendentalist, if he still lived.  Did he really want Inculta back in his life?  I could see that Vulpes might be able to change, but that didn’t mean I was willing to risk Zion’s safety for him, if my… friend had even survived.  “Coyote?  Did he ever tell you his other name?”

Vulpes scowled.  “Why is it that you insist on referring to her a man?  Minerva.”  I felt annoyed and a little shocked, but I guess he only saw the latter emotion, because he explained, “Her other name is Minerva, that was what I called her while in Legion camps.”  

“Uh, no.  It’s really not.  _He_ never mentioned being known by a different name around the Legion.  He just told _me_ that Coyote is his surname.”

“And you know her first name?”  He was surprised.  He had genuinely had no idea that Coyote even had another name, he seemed equally clueless about the man’s gender.  Had they known each other _at all_?

“Yes,” I admitted, “but he didn’t tell anyone he didn’t trust.”  However legendary his composure, for a split second his face showed how devastated he felt by that concept and my compassion got the better of me.  For a moment, I forgot who I was dealing with and explained more gently, “Sorry.  I don’t think he wanted people to know his name unless he trusted them, I thought he might have told you, and maybe he had planned to tell you, but he didn’t and I won’t.”  

We lapsed into silence.  After a moment he spoke very softly, every bit the fearsome legionary that he hadn’t seemed to be since I’d found him here.  “…I could make you talk.”

“I don’t think you realize how stubborn I can be.  And his name isn’t really that important.  More surprisingly, I _know_ you two had some kind of relationship and he never mentioned that he wanted to addressed as— and considered himself to be— a man?”  Mentally speaking, he _was_ a man, even if his body hadn’t gotten the memo.  Given his general attitude towards his feminine body, having sex at all seemed like it would disturb him, let alone having sex with a man who didn’t know he was transexual, but I didn’t want to think about that too much.  

This time Vulpes concealed whatever reaction he had.  He fell silent again for several seconds before asking, “How did you know Coyote?”

“Well,” I hesitated, debating how much detail I should give.  He deserved to know something about his friend, perhaps his only friend at this point, and he clearly did care for Coyote…  “He lived in Freeside for a while.”

I had planned to keep talking, but he looked shocked, so I stopped until he explained by way of a question.  “She passed for a man, didn’t sh-he?”  At least he was trying to accept him.  

I nodded.  “As far as I know, only myself and two others ever knew his body was female.”

He folded his arms around his knees and locked me in a stare that wouldn’t have looked out-of-place during an interrogation.  “How did you know?”

“I saved his life.”  His brows knitted slightly and I clarified, “You know I’m a doctor, right?  There are some things that become pretty obvious in a medical examination.”  

He accepted that with more than a hint of annoyance.  Okay, he definitely had more than a friendship here.  

I took the opportunity to ask my own question.  “Why did you come here?”  

Vulpes ignored me.  “Where is Coyote?”  

I sighed and scowled at him.  Why did I even bother?  “I’ll tell you if you tell me why you came here.”  Zion was probably dead anyway.  Even if he was alive, he had a way of spotting people well before they saw him.  Even if Vulpes tried to find him, Zion could probably evade him if he wanted to.  

He hesitated.  “I came here to find Coyote.”  

Now I was even more baffled.  “And Coyote lives here, does he?”  I ran a hand through my hair, inadvertently ruffling it in exasperation.  “This is an E—!  A-a very boring, cold, and empty bunker.  _Nobody_ lives here.  Why would Coyote be here?”

A fire lit in his eyes and he scrambled to his feet.  I realized why and grabbed his arms to stop him.  

“He’s _not_ here.”  Of course, I sounded like I was hiding something, and right now he assumed that was Zion.  “He left before the battle,” I admitted, “He didn’t want the Legion or the NCR trying to hunt him down.  He went North, I think.  He mentioned Zion Park, and Wald— er… a place very far northeast of here.  If the park didn’t work out.”

Vulpes stopped struggling.  He tore free of my grip just as I was about to let him go.  When he bent to grab the knife off the floor, I reached for the plasma defender I’d left on my power armor and fully expected to be killed when it wasn’t in the holster on my hip.  

Vulpes just stowed the knife in an empty sheathe on his belt.  “Then I must head to Zion.”

For a moment, I misunderstood him, but corrected myself before he realized that.  

“Oh.  Right.  Of course.”

I was a little bitter that he still hadn’t told me why he’d come to this bunker to begin with, and he must have picked up on my tone, because, to my amazement, he stopped and looked back to explain.  

“We spent time in this bunker before we got separated.  I had felt… I had felt that it would be a comfort to return.”  

Oh, yeah, freezing secret Enclave bunkers, perfect vacation spot.  Well, I guess it was at least secluded.  I could see why they might have ended up here, though it probably had less to do with scenic, possibly romantic hideaways and more with the nearby ranger outpost or Jacobstown, or some other Legion espionage mission.  They wouldn’t have been able to get past the main door, but the entryway did offer some shelter, so maybe they’d just been caught in a blizzard.  

He waved.  He had the audacity to act polite and I felt too dazed and numb to do anything but wave back stupidly.  Had today really happened?  Saving his life was just one more absurdity in the long list of nightmares my life had become lately.  I didn’t see him for years after that moment and I returned to Daisy with one more story to tell.  

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I regret some of the beginning section in Freeside, but I felt like I had to explain how Arcade was so promiscuous. >_> This chapter became longer than I'd expected, the next one will probably be short, but it might surprise me.


	15. Creede of Ignorance

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title from a Winston Churchill quote: “Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.”  
> It's partly related to Arcade's views, but honestly I just wanted to make a pun off Creede.   
> Also, I'm not sure about the pacing of this chapter, but it seemed better that things end up a bit rushed rather than having it slog through stuff that isn't relevant to spread out major events.

It seemed appropriate, given the way my life had always gone, that once again, I found myself in the same position I’d been in six years ago.  

The temperature had dropped since I’d been out here.  It was four degrees now, probably with a slight windchill.  The snow had begun to fall, yet again, and I guess that was good because it would probably hide my footprints in the knee-high drifts that led to this place.  In this tiny mining town tucked between two towering cliffs, I’d started to think we were safe.  That _I_ was safe.  We hadn’t seen any rangers or bounty hunters, or even any other people for weeks.  This was Colorado, in the winter.  Early January.  A town called Creede, judging by the old and surprisingly intact sign at the open end of the valley.  The town was empty, had been empty since the war from the look of things.  It felt like the world had forgotten about it and the empty cabins and buildings held the seem eerie silence as the mines themselves.  We’d stayed in the mines our first night but risked cabins and houses after that, never sleeping in the same one twice.  For six years, we had run more actively than we had since I’d been a kid.  We’d worked our way north, passing through Zion Park, and ended up here.  I’d found no trace of my friend.  The Legion had taken it over.  We’d left when it became too dangerous to search any longer.  I didn’t expect to find him anywhere.  

The snow fell fast, as it did most days; it had almost covered the patch of bare dirt before me by the time I snapped out of my daze.  I reached up to tie Daisy’s scarf around a branch of the spruce tree I’d used as a makeshift grave-marker.  It had probably been a stroke, but I hadn’t had the heart to do an autopsy.  She died in her sleep and I couldn’t decide where that left me.  

At the moment, I tried not to think about it, but couldn’t focus on anything else.  Daisy was gone.  The last family I’d had, was dead.  I had no one left.  I was out here, on my own, so far from anything I knew or _any_ civilization…  What was I doing?  _I had nothing left anymore_.  

I must have had enough survival instinct that I found myself turning back towards the town, wandering without much if any direction toward some sort of shelter.  My father’s power armor still kept me warm, at least, but if the snow kept up, it could pile high enough to trap the armor’s legs.  The drifts had been chest-height when we had arrived.  I should get inside, even if I really didn’t care right now.  Everyone I knew was gone.  The NCR, or the Brotherhood, or some cap-driven bounty hunter who wanted to test his luck would find me any time I tried to rejoin civilization.  I’d find a town that was remote without being practically a myth and I’d try to settle down and help people and maybe even build some semblance of a life, and they’d show up.  I wasn’t even sure that it was worth running anymore.  What did I have left to lose?

In the month we’d spent here, I’d seen nothing bigger or more threatening than a bluebird.  I don’t know if it was an _actual_ bluebird, it was probably just a mutant sparrow that had changed color for some reason, but most birds had died out long ago and after seeing nothing but ravens, crows, hawks, and vultures, I’d wanted to believe that the presence of something like that here might be a good sign.  I wanted to have hope, not just about the survival of things like bluebirds, but about the possibility that I’d finally found a place where I could be safe, I wanted to hope that I could find some place, somewhere, that I could not only be safe, but also help people.  That just didn’t seem likely right now.  

With nothing but the birds and myself, I hadn’t expected any sound aside from the crunch of my legs through the snow.  I didn’t hear anything before a bullet glanced off my helmet.  I knew from the sound and minimal force that it was low-caliber for a rifle and a lifetime of fear and combat training kicked in.  The ranger was liquified before I realized I’d pulled the trigger.  I couldn’t decide if I was sad he’d needed to die or sad that I’d killed him before he could kill me.  Or if it was just the day’s emotions finally catching up.  

Rangers usually worked alone, so I lowered my plasma defender (I’d left my gauss rifle on my back).  I slogged further into town, staring at the empty houses with half a mind to search them.  I don’t know if I would have wanted to find a bottle of wine or a box of chocolates, or something to make giving up more easy.  I’d spent a lot of time since the dam forcing myself to keep going and wondering if I should really bother.  Daisy had made that decision for me, but now I didn’t know if I could talk myself out of it.  It didn’t help that I knew so many ways to end a life.  

But today wasn’t that day.  I realized that as I drifted towards the cabin we’d slept in last night for the same reason that I couldn’t bring myself to go inside.  I had to try for at least a day after she’d died, Daisy would have wanted that.  I started towards a different cabin down the street when the second ranger caught up with me.  

I barely felt the sudden weight on my shoulders as he leapt onto my back, possibly to knock me off balance, but probably to get his knife close to my neck.  The blade slipped between the metal to slice the armor open along the joint, but he stabbed too low and the tip gouged along my collarbone rather than into my jugular, though it was dangerously close.  

I didn’t fight back for a few seconds and to my very great surprise, standing perfectly still and waiting for death was a great strategy.  I’d thought he would withdraw the blade and stab again, higher up, but he didn’t.  The ranger pulled the blade out and dropped off my back into the snow.  I didn’t know if he still planned to kill me and I wasn’t sure I cared, so I stayed where I was, but now I felt a bit curious.  Somehow curiosity broke through my gloom like a distant light through a lot of fog.  Why had he let go?  If I wanted to, I could shoot him at any moment now, he’d just given up his advantage, what was he doing?  

The ranger trudged through the snow to stand in front of me.  He was a veteran, judging from his black armor, but he seemed just as confused right now as I was.  He put his hands on his hips and cocked his head, studying me and the blood starting to freeze in the joint at my neck and dripping down the front of my armor.  

“…Now how the hell do I bring him back?”  

It finally clicked.  _He thought I was dead._   Power armor didn’t always open when the occupant died, not that it ran around on its own, but it just stopped moving.  Really, there was no way to tell between someone standing still in armor and armor that held a corpse.  Completely by accident, I had just faked my death.  

I guess I should do something about him before the still-falling snow trapped me where I stood.  

It wasn’t until he reached up to take off my helmet, evidently deciding he’d just cut off my head like Wolf had done to the Fiend leaders, that I overcame my apathy to retaliate.  The muzzle of my plasma defender dug into his chest as soon as his hands gripped the sides of my helmet.  For the barest instant he had the chance to scream before I drowned his voice in the sound of the shot.  It hadn’t even crossed my mind that I might spare him.  I couldn’t, I knew that, but I hadn’t even entertained the _possibility_.  And more than I wanted to admit, I had _enjoyed_ the terror I’d heard in that scream.  These bastards had been hunting me all my life, _not today_.  Today was not the day that the NCR would wipe us out, I would not let that happen.  

Today wouldn’t be the day they’d kill the last of us, but it might be the day that all this fear and hopelessness overcame my morals.  I didn’t want to believe that could happen.  I wouldn’t let that happen.  …assuming I could manage not to really hate them.  I’d seen what that had done to Moreno, it wasn’t going to happen to me.  But right now, I wasn’t sure I could really do that.  Could I still consider myself a good man with how much I wanted them dead?  That scared me more than the loss, and my own despair.

I stumbled into the cabin I’d selected and closed the door without looking around.  If there was another ranger in here, I wasn’t going to stop them.  I got out of my armor and felt around until I found a couch, where I lay down.  The cabin’s tiny windows were so heavily curtained that even through the snow and sunlight, I could only see the gleaming where the light filtering underneath the curtains struck glass.  I didn’t look too closely and closed my eyes.  

My neck had stopped bleeding and the wound wouldn’t be difficult to tend.  I was most definitely alive and right now I couldn’t bring myself to appreciate that truth.  There was no where safe.  Even here, the rangers had found me.  They would find me anywhere.  Anyone I ever met would be in danger because just about everyone wanted to kill me for where I’d been born. 

After a long and incredibly trying day, and all the residual fear and worry I’d carried with me from my childhood, I broke down.  That didn’t happen often.  Even after the dam, I’d kept most of my emotion pretty contained and just focused on the fact that I still had Daisy, now all of that came pouring out.  At some point I stopped crying and just lay there on my back, legs dangling off one arm of the couch, glasses pushed up to my forehead, staring at the ceiling and not really seeing how dark the room had gotten.  

I couldn’t sleep.  I didn’t sleep very well under normal circumstances, and right now, emotionally drained as I was, I felt wide awake.  I chewed my chapped lips and debated my options.  I felt like, if I tried to sleep, I’d just lie here feeling depressed and alone, and that would make things worse.  I needed a distraction.  If I could find a mirror, I could patch myself up and fix my armor, maybe even read a bit in the hope that old, familiar stories would calm me down.  Six years with just the books in my bag and a deck of cards, I’d read all of them over a dozen times.  We’d spent too many hours hiding in caves and pre-war buildings, we hadn’t often been able to chat or play cards; reading was quiet.  

I got up to get the lantern from my bag and set it up.  When the bright white glow lit the small room, I nearly fainted.  I had the lantern on the floor, behind the heel of my power armor, and I crouched to set it up with the couch behind me.  The eerie shadows it cast didn’t bother me, nor did the more concerning blood-soaked cot.  What terrified me was that, behind my own tesla power armor stood two other suits, nearly identical except for grime.  The snow had mostly cleaned mine off, but these two looked like they’d been worn for years, or maybe they’d just seen a lot of battle.  I glimpsed an equally familiar brown uniform neatly folded on a table beside the bloody bed.  The Enclave had been here, and not just in the past week.  

The suits stood open, and everything I hadn’t already touched bore a frosting of dust.  These hadn’t been moved in at least a decade, maybe two.  The room had three cots, two with power armor in front of them, open towards the door, and the bloody bed had the officer’s uniform.  I checked the whole cabin for bodies, or skeletons, and found nothing but a musty, bloody smell.  It was hard to tell, but the blood on the bed didn’t look like a fatal hemorage.  

The cut on my neck had nicked the bone, but the damage to the armor was worse.  I didn’t know enough to really repair it.  I got duct tape and fixed the seal as best as I could.  It should keep me warm, but I wouldn’t want to walk through any craters until I could find someone to fix it more permanently.  If that ever happened.  

I guess I could head east, maybe if I went far enough they’d eventually stop chasing me.  Maybe.  I didn’t really think that would ever happen.  I didn’t want to stay here, in this both literal and metaphorical ghost town.  My power armor was fixed well enough that I could leave tomorrow.  Maybe I _would_ go to Walden Pond, like I’d thought I might six years ago.  Even though it had probably been destroyed in the war.  

Maybe somehow Zion was still alive.  At least it might be good to go there if I could find it, pay my respects in a way.  

The cabin had a bathroom with a mirror in it, and I used that mirror to check the cut on my neck.  It was deep, and might get infected if I didn’t clean it well.  We’d run out of stimpaks nearly a year ago, but I had the supplies to clean, stitch, and bandage the wound and I did so.  It hurt and I knew it would continue hurting for the weeks until it healed, but I’d had worse.  I’d had a lot worse.  All in all, my life attracted serious injury like the Strip attracted gamblers.  NCR soldiers shooting at me when I’d been a kid sort of set a bad precedent for safety.  

The memory bothered me, half because of how traumatic that had been when it had happened and half because of the surge of hate that came with it.  I really didn’t want to hate them.  I hated what they did, and I hated that they would blindly obey such orders, but I really didn’t want to just hate the NCR, or even the Brotherhood, on principle.  Even if they had never given me much reason to give them a chance.  

I needed something to distract myself, so I dug out my favorite of the books and read.  I woke up some time the next afternoon with Pride and Prejudice lying open on my chest.  I should get going before I lost too much of the day; I should try to reach some kind of shelter by nightfall… although I guess I didn’t really need to stop at night anymore.  I had plenty of light from my armor, at night I was practically a beacon, but if anyone took issue with me they could take it up with my gauss rifle.  

I looked over the armor and uniform one last time, finding no further information about why or when the Enclave had been here, or what had happened to the owners of this stuff.  It always bothered me how many questions I had that could never be answered, there were just so many things that made me wonder about the stories behind them, the armor was only the most significant one I’d found recently.  I had to admit, finding the tesla armor here unnerved me more than it might have; it reminded me of all the unanswered questions I had about my father.  I guess, now for certain, I would never know.  

I set out barely ten minutes after I woke up.  The snow reached my hips and filled the town in undisturbed drifts.  Without a single cloud visible in the sky, it glowed blindingly and I felt more grateful than ever for the tinted bulletproof glass over my eyes.  A bird chirped, startling me in the eerie silence of Creede.  The blue bird flew down off the roof of the cabin I’d slept in and pecked at a branch in the snow.  Aside from a vestigial third wing, it looked surprisingly like pictures I’d seen in old books and holotapes.  It fled into the trees as I started walking towards the end of the canyon.  

The snow was probably the most dangerous thing out here right now.  After the first few steps, I realized that it was mostly powder beneath the upper layer of ice where the sun had melted it.  I could break the ice as I walked and the armor moved easily enough through the rest.  When it had been chest height, it had been wet snow and incredibly difficult to move through, now I wouldn’t be trapped unless I happened upon a hole or a pond beneath the drifts.  

I’d spent a great deal of my life trekking across the wasteland and although the snow made for a bit of a change, I fell into the usual routine of trudging ever onward, rifle in hand, scanning the hills and cliffs and forests for movement.  I saw crows and ravens, but nothing else, not even footprints in the snow except my own.  Actually it was more of a narrow snow-canyon with the depth of the powder.  

I didn’t see so much as a mutant deer until the sun had begun to set.  

After a while, the road left the canyon and trailed out into a wide valley.  I followed what road signs I could see because I remembered a river between the road and the trees.  Snow had covered it since before we’d arrived, and it might have dried up long ago, but I’d noted it on an old world map and didn’t want to risk a plunge into water I might not be able to escape.  The deer followed the road as well, maybe to avoid the river or maybe just for better footing.  Power armor crackling with electricity didn’t deter them and they kept just enough distance that I didn’t shoot them as they fled.  They weren’t attacking they were running, which meant something was behind them.  That was the real threat.  I leveled my rifle, expecting a yao guai, or feral ghouls, or maybe some kind of mutant wolf.  I didn’t see anything.  

The road ran though a section of forest where the deer had been spooked, and that was the way I was headed.  Turning to one side risked the river and the other edge of the road met a steep slope.  I advanced cautiously.  

It was probably a yao guai.  I hadn’t seen any sign of ghouls or even much radiation in this area and wolves would probably have chased the deer.  The snow held the tree branches in dark tents over the ground.  Just about anything could be hidden by them.  Did yao guai hibernate?  If I could have moved more quietly, I would have.  As it was, I just kept walking, looking around and listening for the slightest shift of snow over my own footsteps.  At least the dazzling light off the ice made it easy to see here.  

A sharp whistle rent the air and I nearly screamed.  I spun towards the sound and found myself facing over two tons of heavily scaled, heavily muscled deathclaw.  The whistle had made me realize what I was dealing with, but in the panic of hearing it right behind me, it took me a second to realize why the massive pale and glowing specimen was not attacking me.  It was Geiger.  

He had grown.  Clearly, he was an adult, but I still suspected that something had accelerated his growth a bit beyond what was normal even for deathclaws.  He towered over me despite my height and my armor.  Each glowing green horn curved out, down, and up, ending in a truly impressive curl.  I’d only seen one deathclaw with horns like that, and they’d been much thinner.  A handful of pelts covered his body, probably meant to insulate him in the cold.  He stood with his claws buried in the snow, watching me with his eyes innocently wide even though I couldn’t determine his intentions.  

In the light off the snow, I might not have noticed his pale skin and the glow of his body, but he still must have been behind a tree or something.  Maybe he’d had run-ins with the Brotherhood and learned to fear people in power armor.  But then how had he recognized me?  

As if answering my confusion, Geiger picked up the leg I had mended when he’d been young and nuzzled my rifle with a snout the size of my ribcage.  I tried not to realize what that mouth could do to my armor.  “Are you thanking me?”

He sort of hummed in what I took to be ascent.  I’d heard of one deathclaw that could speak, but either Geiger was less intelligent than he seemed or he was mute.  I suspected the latter.  

I hadn’t seen or heard about Geiger since Zion had left Freeside, the ex-legionary must have taken him with him when he left.  Suddenly, I had to scan the forest around us, just in case.  Surely, if Zion was here, he would have said something.  He wouldn’t have left Geiger willingly, would he?  He’d brought the deathclaw into Freeside, he’d probably take him into other civilization just as nonchalantly.  If Geiger was alone, Zion was probably dead.  He’d probably died in childbirth.  Still, I had to be sure.  “Geiger, where is Zion?”

As alarmingly nimble as any deathclaw, Geiger hopped around me and up the road a bit, bounding through the snow like a puppy.  He stopped and whistled again.  However limited his ability to speak, this was quite clearly a beckoning whistle.  I managed half a smile and trudged after him.  The deathclaw could be surprisingly charming, like an enormous, armored and deadly dog.  Even if he led me to a grave, I had to know.  

~       ~      ~

As it happened, Geiger did not lead me to a grave.  He walked long into the night, almost tirelessly.  He only slowed in that he stopped bounding and maintained a steady lumbering walk.  I followed for a day and a half before exhaustion really set in.  On the off-chance that he might answer, I asked, “How far are we going?”  For all I know, the deathclaw was leading me to Walden Pond, and he’d just come west to find me.  I didn’t expect that to be true, but I really had no idea how far we’d be walking and more than another day meant I should probably stop and rest.  

By way of answer, Geiger raised five claws.  

“Five what?  Miles?  States?  Hours?  Days?”

He nodded vigorously at the last one.  Five days.  And we were following the road northeast.  Five days was Denver.  Granted, in power armor, with a gauss rifle, and a deathclaw, I could hardly be more heavily armed for Legion territory, but I didn’t like that idea.  But Zion had mentioned that he’d grown up in Denver, before the Legion.  It would make sense that he might return.  

Five days was too long to walk without stopping, even in power armor.  We rested in caves and abandoned buildings, Geiger’s massive body warding off anything that might threaten us.  I still kept my rifle close and every crunch of snow or snapping twig made me flinch, but the deathclaw helped me to sleep a little easier.  

We reached Denver after six days.  Grey clouds hung low over the city and fires sent up smoke to join them.  There were dogs everywhere, to the point that the streets echoed with barking, but no sign of the Legion.  Raiders saw us and ducked out of sight and I think we passed a few merchants who drove their brahmin into buildings to hide.  Oddly, there were no supermutants, no sign of anything but dogs and people, actually.  At one point, Geiger sniffed the air and bellowed, a sound answered by an eerily similar roar, but I never saw any deathclaws aside from my glowing companion.  

After nearly an hour we reached an old section of the city with the same snarling canine painted on walls and windows.  It was a warning, or it seemed to be.  Maybe this was some gang.  More than likely it marked the territory of Zion’s tribe, considering the name “Coyote”.  The streets looked deserted, but years of combat and paranoia let me notice the incredible amount of ledges, dumpsters, and alleys that offered easy cover.  The eerie silence reaffirmed my belief that these streets were not empty.  

Geiger whistled sharply and a face poked out from the nearest dumpster.  A round face, with pale blue eyes, a large black nose, and a coat of short blonde fur.  Long floppy ears perked up.  It looked like a labrador and that’s what I thought I was seeing until she stood up and climbed out of the dumpster.  

What the hell was I seeing?  

She stood barely five feet tall, entirely canine except for her clothes and the fact that she walked upright on dainty paws strapped into periwinkle blue high heels.  Her dress had a pattern of blue flowers and surprisingly little grime or damage, especially considering the dumpster.  Even ignoring the clothes, it was deeply disturbing to see a dog walking around so unnaturally to the point that it bothered me less to watch her shift into human form.  She remained just as short and stocky with smooth hair as blonde as her fur had been.  

“Who are you?”  

The dog-woman addressed only me, evidently she already knew Geiger and the deathclaw walked over to nuzzle her.  There weren’t multiple deathclaws like this, right?  This was clearly Geiger.  Maybe he had misunderstood me and brought me to the person who cared for him now.  Not that a deathclaw of his size needed much tending.  

“I’m Arcade Gannon…”  I frowned at Geiger, wondering and hoping that he’d understood the question that brought us here.  

I was about to ask when this woman introduced herself.  “Call me Coyote.  Why did Geiger bring you here?”  She seemed as wary as I normally would have been, and considering she could change form that wasn’t too surprising.  She was probably a genetic experiment of some kind, maybe this was related to the healing ability Zion possessed.  Right now I was distracted by her name.  

“You’re part of Zion’s tribe?”

Those blue eyes widened and I couldn’t tell if she was about to flee or open up to me.  “He told you his name?”

“Yeah.  He told me about your culture.  He said it’s a sign of trust.”  

She tilted her head, looking at me more carefully.  I could see her relaxing, she stood up straighter and rested her heels in her shoes; she’d been ready to run only a second ago.  “Yeah…  Look, Zion hasn’t been here in years.  He passed through here, but Rus…  He had to leave.  I think he went east.  You should go.”

The way she said that unnerved me.  That was the same tone I heard from abuse victims who didn’t want me investigating the cause of their bruises.  “Why?”

Before she could answer, a gravely old voice called out from an alley, “Liberty, could you fix the turrets?  Damn things keep targeting those new guys, the ones with the same names.  Lukias?  Lucas?  Lucullen?  What—”  A big grey dog, easily three feet at the shoulder, stepped into view and froze.  However bony and grizzled he appeared, he was huge, and I wasn’t about to make the mistake of assuming this was an ordinary mutt.  Especially when his snarl turned into a shout.  “Get out!”

I held my rifle ready, but didn’t aim at him and he didn’t lunge.  I didn’t want to shoot without knowing the full story; they seemed more isolationist and paranoid than openly hostile.  Maybe they knew something about why the Enclave had been in this area, or better yet maybe they knew where Zion had gone.  Liberty stepped between us.  “Don’t hurt him, he knows Zion!”

The grey dog growled and licked his lips like he had a bad taste in his mouth.  “How?”  He sounded so calm that I thought he might have warmed to me.  I started to answer but before I could, he barked, “What the hell did you do to her, you Enclave bastard?!”  Oh.  _That_ explained his hostility.  

Liberty spun towards him.  “What?”  The grey dog nodded back at me and she followed his gaze.  I felt her eyes linger on the E emblazoned on my armor as her skin paled even more.  “You’re _Enclave_?  Why are you here?”

Geiger whistled uncomfortably and clacked his claws together.  The deathclaw wasn’t nearly as threatening when he looked like a guilty schoolboy, but right now I might have appreciated his support.  I raised my hands.  “I just want to find Zion.  We were friends.  I haven’t been with the Enclave in years.”  Well, not _really_.  

The grey dog narrowed his eyes.  “A _likely_ story.  And if you find Zion?”

…I didn’t actually know.  I wanted to make a joke about ravishing him in celebration, but this didn’t seem like the best time for humor.  “I just want to know he’s alright.  He…wasn’t doing so well when I last saw him.”

Liberty frowned at me.  “When was that?”  She looked at the old dog and added, “He knew Zion’s name when he arrived, I believe him.”  The old dog didn’t seem persuaded.  He eyed me suspiciously as I answered.  

“Six years ago.”

Liberty widened her eyes again and the grey scowled.  “You responsible for her… condition?”  

Why did I suddenly feel like a boyfriend meeting a girl’s father?  I wished the old guy could have seen my annoyance, although he probably heard it in my tone.  “No.  _I’m_ the one who saved Zion’s life.  Twice, actually.  And did my best to talk him out of leaving so he wouldn’t risk getting himself killed.  He was pregnant when we met.  What exactly do you know about the Enclave?”  

He scoffed.  “Wouldn’t you like to know!”

“Yes, actually, that’s why I asked.”

Liberty interrupted before this could devolve into a fight.  “Zion had kids.  He went up to Creede, where he’d been born, when Russel wouldn’t let him rejoin the tribe—”

Grey snarled.  “Speak of the devil…”

Something stalked towards us along the center of the empty street, evidently this was Russel.  Russel stood six feet tall on all fours, his lean canine body covered in muscle and rust-red fur.  He had black markings on his muzzle, back, and paws and a notably fox-like tail.  His ears stood out like satellite dishes on his head.  They were easily as big as his skull and twitched about in a way that would have been adorable if not for the size, aura of menace, and the sheer unnatural appearance of the rest of him.  His body looked eerily human, almost human pelvis on a canine spine, more human musculature than canine, cheekbones that gave his skull an unsettling appearance.  His yellow eyes gleamed from patches of black fur on an angular face over a smile that was all fangs and psychosis.  

His voice proved just as disturbing; he spoke in a quiet drawl that held the same unnerving false-eloquence of the White Glove Society.  “It looks like we have a guest.”  He slunk towards me as if it was completely normal for a dog to speak.  “I hope you’ve been welcoming, Grey, I know how you can be…”  

Grey, apparently the grey dog, snapped a reply, “He’s _Enclave_ , Russ.  We can’t take him in, are you crazy?”

Russel narrowed his eyes very slightly.  “I took _you_ in, didn’t I?”  Was he saying that Grey had been part of the Enclave?  He did seem around sixty of seventy, it was possible…  

I raised my hands again.  “I’m just looking for someone.”

Russel stepped a little closer to me and tilted his head, those jaws eerily at eye-level with me.  “Oh?  Who are you looking for?”  Up close I noticed that unlike Grey, Russel wasn’t completely nude.  He had a belt around his waist holding a sheathed dagger.  It wasn’t the same blade Vulpes had possessed, but the handle looked fancy; the blade might be silver.  If this canine-transformation condition was related to Zion’s healing ability… 

“Zion.”

Russel almost glared but I didn’t get a chance to hear his response.  At that moment, a scruffy beige and black wolf stepped into view accompanied by a brown canine resembling a labrador but nearly as massive as Russel.  Both looked my way and snarled.  The wolf cried out in a voice I didn’t recognize.  “Gannon!”

Russel rounded on him as both new arrivals charged my way.  He yelled something inarticulate and the three of them slammed into each other in a flurry of barking and growling.  From the side of the street Grey shouted to no clear combatant, “Grab the knife!”  I was too stunned to move.  I didn’t even know whose side I was on.  Liberty shoved me backwards.  

“Run!”  

She was probably right.  If I shot at any of them, they might have the same healing abilities as Zion and Vulpes, which would just make me a target.  Power armor was not built for running, but I put a good distance between myself and the pack in the hope that Liberty, running along beside me, might tell me more of where Zion went.  If he had been in Creede, I hadn’t found evidence of him, but maybe she knew where he’d gone afterwards.  

Halfway through the city from the tribe, pounding paws gained on us and I turned around just in time to hear a shout of “Retribution!” as about eight hundred pounds of canine lunged at me.  It was the giant lab from the pack, and the voice was unmistakably the same legionary who’d transported Wolf and I to the Legion Fort.  Oh.  That explained how they’d recognize me.  Shooting him point-blank with my gauss rifle launched him backwards but his wounds had healed before he even stood up.  Geiger solved the problem.  For a split second canine eyes stared him down fearlessly before Geiger hooked him on one massive clawed hand and swung, pitching the bear-sized dog through the window of a building nearly a hundred feet down the road.  If he survived, he wouldn’t be reaching us anytime soon.  

After that we reached the city limits uneventfully.  Liberty stopped to explain.  “Sorry, I didn’t realize they knew you.  We only took in those Legion guys recently.  And they were… infected before they got here.”  Vulpes’ doing, probably.  “We’ve never had anyone else show up like that.  And Grey’s… cautious.  You seem alright, and Zion must have trusted you.”

“Yeah, he did.”  As much as I wanted an answer about Zion, I didn’t think I’d have another chance to ask about Grey.  “How does he know the Enclave?”

Liberty hesitated and eyed me distrustfully, a look I knew pretty well but wasn’t usually receiving.  “He was part of it.” she admitted at length, “He, my mom, and Zion’s mom were part of it before we were born.  I don’t think Grey told Zion before he left.”  

Now I was surprised.  “Zion’s parents were in the Enclave?”

“His mom.  Russel…  Russel is his father.”  She looked back towards the tribe’s territory even though we couldn’t see or hear anything from this distance.  “He ordered Geiger to watch me and keep me safe when he left.  Even Russel didn’t want to mess with a deathclaw.”  Another statement that made me worry about how he treated her.  The knowledge that all of them probably healed cuts and bruises in minutes didn’t help that worry.  Liberty nodded to the east.  “He wanted to head toward Boston after he had kids, if he survived.”

“I came from Creede,” I reassured, “I didn’t see him there.”  But I did find armor and a uniform, one of which had probably belonged to his mother.  

Liberty managed a smile.  “He probably went to Walden Pond.  He always talked about it.  He loved Thoreau, we used to read all the time as kids.”

“You read a lot, didn’t you?”

“I still do.”

We fell silent and she nodded towards the horizon.  “You should go.  Before Russel comes after us.”  She looked at Geiger.  “Go with him, I can handle myself.”

She started back towards the tribe and I called after her.  “Hey, you be careful too, alright?  Zion left Geiger here for a reason, he wanted you to be safe.  If you’re not safe here…”

She considered and shrugged.  “I’m safer here than on the road.  You should go.  Make sure Zion hasn’t caused too much trouble.”

I chuckled.  He did have a way of doing that, didn’t he? 


	16. Ghosts of the Past

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> chapter title is a reference to Ghosts of the Mojave, even though the rest isn't really related to that. ^w^'  
> Also, be warned, this is another kind of dark, kind of graphic chapter. 
> 
> PERSPECTIVE SHIFTS TO A NEW CHARACTER, please tell me if it is or isn't clear who he is, and I can note that at the start of the chapter.

I rolled over and stretched out on the bed.  “Damn…  That was amazing.”  

Coyote chuckled and pulled the sheets up to his chest almost self-consciously.  I guess it was his scars.  The guy made his limp into a swagger and yet he got weird about the pink lines across his chest.  I mean, he’d helped me with the Gunners, and he had a dangerous reputation even more than I did, so I just didn’t get how he could be so shy about that, especially in Goodneighbor, but hey, he’d always been a bit strange.  

He opened his mouth to say something, but that was when the door creaked open.  

A small face poked into the room, framed with black hair longer and wilder than Coyote’s.  Not for the first time, I really appreciated the blankets covering both of us.  At least the kid hadn’t been a few seconds earlier.  

“Daddy?”

Coyote propped himself on his elbows and frowned towards the door.  I heard a trace of annoyance to his voice, but he hid it well enough.  “Jay, what is it?”

The six year old rocked back and forth, half hiding behind the door.  She hesitated to answer.  The kid had been through a lot, she’d been this cautious since they’d all showed up here.  I mean, I wasn’t a very patient guy, but I cut her some slack and let her answer in her own good time, as did Coyote.  

Eventually, Jay focused her pale blue eyes on the door knob and murmured.  “There’s another vertibird outside.”  

A second ago, Coyote looked like he planned to spend all day in this bed, but now he was suddenly on edge.  I really believed all the stories about him when he looked like that.  “Outside in town, or a few streets away, or in the distance?”

Jay teared up.  “I-I don’t know.  It was just in the sky, and it went behind a building.  I don’t know where it went…”  She started to cry and then opened the door and walked towards her father.  

Coyote stopped her.  “Jay, go to your brother and stay with him, I’ll be there in a second.”

The bawling kid bit her lip and nodded, rushing off like a soldier to do as she’d been told.  As soon as she was gone, Coyote hopped up to get dressed.  

“What is it with you and vertibirds?”  They were pretty dangerous, but they mostly left people alone.  The kids were afraid, and with good reason, but vertibirds didn’t exactly top the list of threats.  Coyote had been kind of harsh on his daughter, but I could understand that from him, and it was probably best to get her out of here as quickly as possible right now.  

“Long story,” Coyote replied, cleaned and dressed in less than a minute.  He’d thrown on his combat armor and that ridiculous dog-hood rather than his suit.  Wild black hair stuck out beneath the fur (he’d cut it himself) and his dark blue eyes had such a crazed look that he seemed ready to shoot someone even when he wasn’t.  

I sighed at the armor.  “Really?  You’re going out there again today?  What about our deal?”

“Hey, I helped you with the Gunners yesterday, I need today.  You get whatever caps I bring in, and I’ll stay here tomorrow.”  I paused half-dressed to retort and he didn’t give me a chance.  “I don’t need the caps, RJ, you do.  You’re the only one I trust to keep an eye on my kids, and it’s a steady job with better pay than what you’d make as a merc, which is saying something.”

“And a lot less shooting things.”  I couldn’t deny his point about the caps, though.  The guy brought in five-hundred on a bad day.  

Coyote scoffed.  “You’d better hope so.  If my life catches up with me, we’ll all be given a run for out money.”

He slung his old rifle over his shoulder and strapped on the belt of his knives and machete.  I didn’t actually know his whole story, and he didn’t talk about a lot of it.  Most of what he said seemed like bullshit, but he had a way of making me believe it.  I put on my coat and hat.  “You plan to shoot it down?”

“Shoot what down?”

I frowned at him.  “The vertibird.  What did you think I was talking about?”

Coyote cocked his head and stepped into the hallway.  “Maybe.  Might just scope out what they’re doing.”

*       *       *

Scoping turned out to be literal.  I’d gotten better as a sniper, mostly through tips from MacCready, but I still wasn’t the best shot; I preferred to fight up close.  From the crumbling roof of an ancient building, I used the scope of my rifle to get a look at the area.  

The vertibird had been one of several, circling around and attacking a church on the edge of town.  I didn’t know what that was about and I doubted I could stop it.  I could see their airship from here, and beneath it the hulking form of a gigantic robot.  It had yet to move and I hoped that meant they had yet to get it working.  Hopefully, that never happened, but with Israel and Jay, I couldn’t risk provoking the Brotherhood to stop it.  

When I’d given birth six years ago, I’d barely survived.  I’d lost two babies and my ability to have any more kids, and left Creede with Jay, Israel, Raven, and Fox.  The war for the dam had engulfed Zion by the time I reached it, so I’d fled to Denver.  My dad had run me off when I’d tried to return to the tribe and I’d gone south to my birthplace, the isolated town my mother had fled to in an effort to escape my father.  My sister, Liberty, had wanted to join me, but the wasteland was dangerous and as cruel as dad could be, the pack was her home.  I still didn’t know if I’d ever expected to leave Creede again, but I had.  With four babies, I’d somehow made it across the country, relying on stealth and cunning to scrape by.  I scavenged food and water from pre-war buildings and post war shacks.  We wouldn’t have survived without our ability to heal so well.  

Out east, I’d met Abraham.  Sole survivor of a pre-war vault, brilliant physician, soldier, and father searching for his son.  After my fight with Wolf, I’d become a pacifist, as much as the wasteland would allow.  I learned to intimidate and avoid threats and lived for many years without the need to raise my machete.  I don’t know if my unusual lifestyle had drawn him to me or if he simply saw common ground in our efforts to protect our children, but we had become friends.  

I didn’t love him or anything, and as open as I was, Abraham wasn’t the type of guy to talk about his past, at least not to me.  He mentioned his son, but nothing else.  He’d go on and on about Shawn while I wrangled my own wild brood.  A big, macho guy, with military-cut black hair, Abraham didn’t connect with children, however hard he tried.  Israel was downright afraid of him even then, and Fox, taking after his father, did whatever he could to outsmart and taunt the doctor.  He told me in private that he didn’t like Abraham because the man “smelled like death.”  He probably meant the chemical odor, or the clinging scent of cryogenic fluid, or just the musty vault-smell; I didn’t think much of the kid’s paranoia at the time.  

To his credit, Abraham remained kind and friendly to my children and spent time with me as a friend and fellow parent.  I suppose my own pacifistic philosophy might have reminded him of pre-war times or maybe it gave him hope for the modern wasteland.  Really, I think he just liked seeing a father and hoping that he might live a similar life to my own, as he knew it at the time.  I didn’t usually travel with him, so most of the time I only met his friends when they were following him.  His dog was the only dog I ever met that got along with skinwalkers, and my kids loved the animal so much that they’d run up to Sanctuary to play with it even before we moved there.  I’d moved to Sanctuary a few months ago, I’d opened up to everyone in that town and let my kids roam freely without concern, surrounded by the turrets Abraham had built.  

I didn’t see eye to eye with any of Abraham’s human friends.  

Preston seemed nice, but the two of us just never got along.  I overheard him telling Abraham that I creeped him out and whenever we spoke he’d ask how I could “just sit by” and abstain from fighting anyone.  He felt I should take up arms, that I _needed_ to take up arms, and, at the time, I disagreed.  I admit his idealism also brought back some painful memories.  

Piper flirted with everyone and had this obsession with “my story.”  She said she knew I’d been through a lot and wouldn’t let me refuse to talk about it any more than she’d stop subtly suggesting that we should date.  I wasn’t into women, however well she got along with my kids.  

As for Cait… well, I just didn’t like Cait.  And I heard about Nick Valentine, but never met him.  Abraham didn’t ask him for help very often and thinking back I suspect that the synth just reminded him too vividly of how much the world had changed.  

I met Hancock in Sanctuary without knowing he was a mayor.  His outfit caught my eye and my kids loved it as well; they of course seized the moment to talk to him and had a very awkward conversation with the ghoul.  I think they got lucky, the guy never seemed the most child friendly, but I never heard what he’d said to them.  Since the first time he saw Hancock, Abraham stopped traveling with anyone else, with one exception.  For months, the two of them became inseparable and I presumed they were more than friends for a long time before Abraham approached me with an idea.  He’d heard me sing to my kids.  He didn’t know the songs, but he liked the voice.  He didn’t explain his side of things, he just escorted me to Goodneighbor, leaving my kids at home.  Really, the idea was sweet, in Abraham’s own, overtly-masculine, old-world romantic way.  He had me replace Magnolia for a bit, sing romantic songs.  He had a signal.  He called Hancock down and they drank and talked while I serenaded the bar with Elvis and Sinatra.  I still don’t know why he didn’t want Magnolia to sing, he might have wanted someone he knew better, or maybe just a male voice.  He gave a signal once they were slightly drunk and I sang the song he’d requested.  

“I never cared much for moonlit skies,

I never winked back at fireflies,

But now that the stars are in your eyes,

I’m beginning to see the light…”

I swear the man looked nervous, and he had a reputation for being damn near invincible.  He didn’t heal like I did, he was just absurdly tough.  Without power armor, he’d fought off a mirelurk queen, according to Preston.  Everyone worshiped him.  He helped the Railroad, he helped the Minutemen, he helped practically everyone.  Folks heralded him as the savior of the Commonwealth after just a few weeks, and the Commonwealth needed a savior from what I heard.  At the time, I’d believed all the stories, even if the man they called fearless looked as nervous as a bride right now.  

Granted, a bride in a patched and bloody jacket and jeans, who turned, as I sang, to arm wrestle the ghoul over the table they were sitting at.  From what I’d heard, that was normal, they arm wrestled all the time, especially when drunk, but this time was special.  I’d noticed that even if I hadn’t known what exactly to expect.  They clasped hands and instead of pressing towards the table, Abraham had turned Hancock’s wrist and kissed the back of his hand.  

Even the more sober people in the Third Rail weren’t about to comment on that, considering who was involved and I tried not to listen in.  I heard something about “trying to throw off his game” before I fought off my frumentarius instincts.  I found out later that Hancock and Abraham hadn’t been involved before than.  The survivor had enlisted me to help him show his feelings.  Even more than before, they became inseparable after that.  

I had told Abraham about my gender and he’d devised and performed a series of surgeries to rectify that problem.  My healing had made things difficult and he had crafted a serum to prevent it, a serum which reduced me to human healing speeds for three weeks at a time.  The surgery had been a success, I was now a man in body as well as mind.  But the timing had cost me dearly.  

Unbeknownst to me, Abraham’s search became a struggle after my surgery.  He learned of a scientist named Virgil and sought him out.  Some trouble had sprung up in Goodneighbor, so Hancock hung back for a day and Abraham, heading into the Glowing Sea, took Piper.  The spunky journalist never returned, and even though I’d never cared for her, I mourned her loss.  Abraham came back with an empty look in his eyes, but I didn’t realize how empty.  Twenty days after my surgery, after two days of struggling to build it, Abraham got a signal intercepter and found his way to the Institute and hopefully Shawn.  

For the months since he’d awakened, Abraham had seen the wasteland with fear and sorrow.  It was a dead land to him, a dangerous land, filled with suffering, and none of the things he had known and loved.  The death of his wife and the loss of his son had piled on more pain than he could take and the frustration to reach the Institute finally broke him.  I never learned what happened after he went there, maybe it had just been some bug in the teleport system that scrambled his brains, but when he returned, the Institute went silent and Abraham was no longer sane.  I don’t know if he ever found his son, and maybe the boy had been killed, but I know Abraham must have killed anyone he could find in the Institute.  When he returned to Sanctuary, I was on a bench with Israel reading beside me while Raven, Fox, and Jay played tag in the street.  

Israel saw him first.  The boy had always been perceptive, but with his fear of Abraham, I don’t know if this was what drove his warning or if he had already noticed the blade in the man’s hand.  “Dad!”

I looked up in time to see the burly soldier cleaving a wicked black knife through the neck of a man tending the tatos.  I stared blankly.  I’d completely let down my guard.  I’d trusted these people to the point that I couldn’t imagine anyone, let alone Abraham himself, breaking the illusion of safety in this town.  I’d been hugely naive, my past should have taught me that peace was impossible in this world.  

Legion training kicked in and drove me to my feet as the survivor butchered his way towards me, stabbing the six settlers who rushed to stop him, stomping their corpses when they fell, and gutting the last with his knife.  Thinking back, I knew he was driven by psychotic rage, and I still find it so difficult to attach that bloody image to the man I had considered a friend.  He lumbered towards me like a freight train, as daunting and invincible as death itself.  The man I’d used to be, the soldier who’d taunted and lunged at rangers without fear, returned and I launched at him, oblivious to the serum that still slowed my healing.  I hadn’t needed to change form in months now that I no longer needed to scavenge alone, but I opened my jaws and leapt with the intention of becoming a canine.  I didn’t.  I realize now that my healing had probably allowed my cells or maybe my DNA to change from human to canine; the serum prevented this change.  

As a result, I sprang at Abraham, six feet and just over a hundred pounds of unarmored man, smacking his shoulders in an effort to knock him over, clawing at his sleeves, and biting with dull human teeth at his chin.  The shock of my attack must have disoriented him, because rather than stabbing, he smacked me away with his forearm, knocking me to the ground and breaking my jaw.  Abraham raised the machete and we both lunged at each other again.  

Retreat had never crossed my mind, a truly Legion way of thinking, I suppose.  I would kill him to save my children or I would be killed trying.  I heard them screaming just as loudly as the rest of the settlement.  Wails and cries filled the air like a horror holotape.  Somebody was shooting, but armored, invincible Abraham didn’t react.  When his blade sliced my belly I expected to die.  

The knife halted, shaking, after only a few inches.  It took everything I had to stay frozen in place and not to fall, finishing the cut for him.  Tiny hands clutched the handle of the knife, between Abraham’s grip and where the blade entered my body.  Raven couldn’t even form a coherent sentence.  Abraham didn’t give the six-year-old a chance.  He tore the blade out of me and cut Raven down as I dropped to my knees in agony.  Clutching my gut and doubled over, I bit the thigh in front of me and got back-handed to the ground, lying half-dead beside the body of my already dead child.  The blade had hurt me because my healing was still slowed, it must have killed Raven because the child could not yet heal fatal wounds.  

Jay grabbed my shoulder and shook me, screaming “Daddy” like a horrified mantra.  I heard Israel bawling helplessly, still on the bench.  Abraham stood frozen, staring down at us, bullets and crimson laser beams shooting past him.  I couldn’t tell what he was thinking and I hardly cared.  Right now, all I could think was hate and loss and rage.  

Fox flew at the man, holding the machete I’d carried since the flood.  Three and a half feet tall, the blade struck Abraham’s groin, slipping through the joint of his armor to cut where his thigh met his hips.  The slightest change in angle would have opened his femoral artery and this whole mess would have ended right there.  As it was, Abraham didn’t even flinch, he just tore my machete free and swung it, slicing the boy’s throat before he could even look up.  Fox crumpled, falling on top of me and I was in too much pain to do more than cradle him and glare up at the survivor who’d once helped me so much.  

Something in Abraham’s cold stare changed a little.  He looked down at the motionless child in my arms and lowered his blade.  I thought he would say something, explain he’d been drugged, or blinded, or he’d lost his mind in the teleporter, and it wouldn’t be enough, but it would be something, it would be better than… this.  

He didn’t.  

Without any explanation or comment, the sole survivor turned and walked into his house.  Preston ran over to me.  He’d been shooting at Abraham this whole time with little result and I guess he figured he’d be more effective at damage control.  All around us the other settlers and the Quincy survivors scrambled for what they could carry and fled east, leaving the dead where they had fallen.  I didn’t hear what Preston was asking me.  Jay wouldn’t let go of my shoulder and hadn’t stopped saying “Daddy” although her scream had become a whisper.  I heard Israel behind me, breathing in that way children did when they’d been crying too long and couldn’t catch their breath.  I had to get them out of here.  

Preston shook my shoulder and I snapped out of my daze.  From the devastated parent, I was back to being the legionary, as cold as I could convince myself I had to be.  I lay Fox on the pavement and stood up, still oblivious to the Minuteman trying to help me.  He swore when he saw the wound to my gut before I clapped a hand over it to slow the blood loss.  I shuffled to Israel and picked him up with Jay still clinging to my shirt like a human tail.  I didn’t look back or even hear Preston’s shouts as I trudged away.  

I healed up two days later at Walden Pond.  Israel got even more quiet and both kids panicked at the slightest possibility of danger.  I became paranoid.  I had to protect them.  I tried to keep us away from anyone, anything that might even possibly hurt us, and I couldn’t do it.  I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t scavenge or hunt, I couldn’t risk going near water for fear of mirelurks.  I needed another option.  Heading south, I heard that more settlements had been attacked.  Abraham was on a rampage.  He killed everything he could find, Sanctuary had not been an isolated incident.  I needed safety.  Diamond City would not let us in.  I went to Goodneighbor.  Hancock already knew.  I spent one night in the streets before I met MacCready.  

He’d never met Abraham but he’d heard the stories.  I’d heard of his bad reputation, but anyone who would stop to make sure my kids didn’t starve was alright by my book.  That was how we got started with our arrangement.  We’d take turns most days.  I’d hunt raiders, and mutants, and deathclaws, and anything else I could find that was threatening the area.  I’d lug back everything I could carry, sell it, and I usually had a chance to rest before we would switch.  Yesterday we’d left the kids alone in the two-room “house” I’d cleared out in a building near the bar.  I’d paid a guard named Jake to watch the door.  It wasn’t to keep the kids inside.  I’d worried all day, but they were safe when we returned.  

My thing with MacCready wasn’t really serious.  I’d just needed a babysitter, and then I’d gotten to like him, and almost trust him, and now we were friends.  Friends who’d been very tired, and horny, and glad that we were still alive after the Gunners.  That was my opinion, anyway.  

Looking out over the Commonwealth, I watched the vertibirds heading back to the airship.  Everyone knew the Brotherhood’s reputation.  Aside from Abraham, they’d become the new boogeyman of the area.  I’d never actually fought them myself.  My mother must have.  I barely remembered her, but a few things she’d said blazed in my memory like flares.  She’d always told me to fear vertibirds.  Now, I guess, I knew why.


	17. Fox Hunt

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> What ever happened to Vulpes?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Another very long chapter and the next might be this long as well.

I’d roamed the Mojave for years under Caesar’s flag, but my journey East proved infinitely more difficult.  I passed through Zion Park, unseen by the tribals, headed north, intending to avoid the Legion, and was forced South by mountains and bad weather.  I made good time until the Legion discovered me.  I’d pushed myself too hard, traveled too quickly with too little rest for too many days and when I was found, I was easily captured.  Lucius led the Legion, but the men who found me took me in as a deserter.  I never reached Lucius; while they took me south, it became clear how quickly the Legion had begun to crumble.  I knew it would be gone within a year.  I gathered my strength and escaped, but I’d lost my point of reference and finding my way became difficult.  I must have wandered for weeks before I found a landmark I’d heard of and turned East from there.  Rivers, canyons, and craters steered me south where wildlife and an inland sea further hampered my progress.  I reached what must have been an ocean after many years and followed the coast North, hoping I’d see some landmark to help me find Walden Pond.  I’d learned my lesson after being captured once and moved more carefully, resting and traveling slowly as a result.  I approached my journey as a military advance, albeit of one man and not an army.  I cleared out raider camps and dens of yao guai to ensure that they would not impede a retreat.  I stockpiled supplies in caves and shacks so I’d have a sanctuary if I ran into trouble.  The trip often did become a struggle.  I fought hundreds of mutant creatures I’d never seen or heard of before, ranging from small but dangerous insects to towering armored water creatures.  Perhaps the latter were mutant fish, or perhaps insects, they had traits of both and I didn’t know enough of aquatic life to identify what they might have mutated from.  It had been almost six years since the dam had been lost when I reached a desolate mire in Maryland.  I fought tribals and worse, in three days there I would have died seven times had I not possessed Coyote’s ability to heal.  The seventh time this happened, I had dragged myself into a mansion to heal.  I’d been met with a ghoul and two dogs, all very put out by my invasion.  Although the dogs surely recognized what I was, the ghoul clearly knew I was no ordinary man when the burns covering my body healed within seconds.  Luckily, an onslaught of tribals attacking my temporary refuge distracted my hosts and the four of us drove them off.  The ghoul, whose name turned out to be Desmond, did not see eye-to-eye with me, as it were, but our goals dovetailed nicely.  In my effort to pass through the region more safely, I assisted him in ridding the world of one of his old enemies.  He rewarded me with a weapon that proved very helpful, especially now that my pistol had broken beyond repair.  I took to carrying the microwave emitter Desmond gave me as an alternative to my machete.  

From Point Lookout, I continued up the coast.  I passed through Washington, following the river around the city before moving closer to the coast.  A Brotherhood base stood openly beside the water.  I had long ago replaced my ranger disguise for a set of combat armor, and if they displayed themselves so openly, they must have few if any enemies in this area.  I would not be recognized as NCR or Legion, even if this branch maintained contact with the bunker Wolf had destroyed.  Knowing what I did of the Brotherhood, I did not expect that they would attack me.  I would appear to be nothing more than a mercenary or perhaps a trader, but I would still keep my distance.  

It was lucky that I chose to be cautious.  Approaching the base slowly, with the microwave emitter lowered and my machete sheathed, the nearest paladin caught sight of me and we exchanged a long, tense stare before he noticed the weapon in my hand.  I didn’t hear what he shouted to his companions, but I saw laser rifles aim my way and I fired before he could shoot.  I had been less careful than I should have been; I hadn’t expected a fight, so I hadn’t made the effort to devise a more effective way of neutralizing the massive fortress.  Six power-armored men or women fell before they forced me back.  I dropped into the river and swam to an old drainage pipe where they didn’t find me.  The Brotherhood concerned me more than most threats.  I had realized long ago that, although most weapons could not kill skinwalkers, I had yet to see the effect of a plasma or laser rifle, should it inflict a hit that would instantly neutralize most targets.  If I could be incinerated as readily as anyone else, I would need to be especially wary of energy weapons.  

I spent several hours trying in vain to wring the water from my clothes and scrape the muck off my armor while I considered the logistics of clearing the Brotherhood fortress as I had thus far cleared all major threats in my journey.  I had seen at least thirty armed warriors outside; the interior must hold twice that number, if not more.  A drainage pipe or water supply might allow easy entry, but I had no sure way of killing so many without more information.  If I sought to eliminate them, it would take much longer than any previous endeavor save the war for the dam.  This branch of the Brotherhood also posed a greater threat to myself than prior combatants, if I chose to destroy them, it would be unlikely that I’d survive.  

I couldn’t risk it.  If I found no trace of Coyote at Walden Pond, perhaps I would return, but right now I could not risk this undertaking.  I left the pipe and continued North.  

What I had mistaken for an isolated chapter, larger than the Mojave branch but not significantly larger, proved to be an army, perhaps an empire.  I passed Brotherhood patrols throughout the wasteland as I journeyed, and I successfully evaded each and every one for over a week.  There were many patrols, however, and as careful as I tried to be, inevitably, one patrol happened to search the building in which I had sheltered for the night.  

I had stopped in a deserted town nestled between two mountains.  I’d traveled somewhat west, avoiding an impassable series of craters along the coast, but I planned to turn towards the shore again once the horizon no longer glowed quite so brightly.  I woke to the screeching of metal on tile as the desk I had pushed against the door was forced inward.  I vaporized the first Brotherhood soldier before he even knew I was there.  The second man shot and missed, and met the same fate by my hand.  A third warrior hid.  I had seen Brotherhood groups of two and of three, but tired as I was, I hadn’t checked for a third man as well as I should have.  I stepped into the street, microwave emitter raised.  I looked left first.  Not right.  The knight pressed against the brick wall to my right had fired before I could turn.  

Her shot seared my neck.  She had aimed for my heart, but I turned and ducked when I heard her shoot.  My response left her as dead as her companions.  Blood poured down my chest from the cauterized wound.  Even with a hand clamped across the vein, I needed help fast.  My thoughts, still slowed by sleep, remained hazy from blood loss.  Had the Brotherhood been after me, or had they come here for some other reason?  Would they have any other reason for searching towns?  What were their goals, exactly?  In my disoriented state, I couldn’t remember.  Maybe someone else lived here.  The town had seemed abandoned, but I hadn’t noticed the Brotherhood, so maybe there were scavengers.  I had always relied on my sight and hearing, but in the overcast night, with my heartbeat pounding in my ears, and my vision blurring, instinct drove me to follow my nose.  I rarely utilized my sense of smell, mostly because there were many things in the wasteland that one simply did not wish to taste in the air.  

But I had not been alone in this town.  Even beneath the Brotherhood’s blood and my own smell, I could detect at least three other people.  Human.  Old scents, old and new, they had lived here for over a year.  Maybe they could help me.  

One hand desperate to stem the blood pouring from my neck, I holstered my gun because I needed my other arm to balance against the walls and lampposts as I followed the trail.  The smell led me to an old basement, a door buried in overgrowth and fallen trees until I only knew it was there because I could smell the occupants.  I dropped to my knees, too weak to stand, and pounded on the metal door in what was less a knock and more a sequence of repeatedly letting my fist fall against the steel.  

I passed out before the doors opened.  

The basement proved to be much colder than I had expected.  I woke, still disoriented, to find my wrists and ankles tied to a chair, a gatling laser inches away from my face.  Colder in every way.  My neck had healed.  Someone must have cleared out the burned tissue as Gannon had in the Mojave.  The wielder of the laser, hidden from me by the massive weapon, nudged it towards my face and barked, “Who are you?  How did you find us here?”

If they had healed me, they must want the information I have, or else they planned to kill me whatever I told them.  In either case, I had little control of the situation, lying would certainly get me nowhere.  “I am Vulpes Inculta,” I answered flatly, staring at the weapon in front of me.  “I realized I was not alone in this town and sought you out once I was wounded in the hope that you would assist me.  Evidently, I was correct.”  I couldn’t see the person interrogating me, but it was a woman.  The room seemed relatively small, but I could hear movement suggesting two other people behind me.  Also women, judging by scent.  

Laser jabbed her weapon my way again.  “You are bold to face us so calmly.  How did you recover so quickly?”

They wouldn’t believe me if I tried to explain.  “It’s an implant.”

“Bullshit.”  The speaker wasn’t the woman with the laser, but someone else, interjecting from behind me.  “You don’t have any implants.”

“How do you know that?”

“We scanned you for advanced tech as soon as we brought you in here.”

Laser seemed to gesture for silence from this other, more open person.  “Inculta, you may not realize the danger you are in, but I’d appreciate if you were honest with us.”

“It’s a pathogen.  I don’t know the details.”

“At all?”  Laser lowered her weapon slightly but did not let me see her face.  “Do you know where or when you contracted it?”

“In Nevada.”  I turned in an effort to see the other women and was rewarded with a relatively gentle smack from the gatling.  “I contracted it from another person who was already infected.”

The second woman spoke again, addressing the one in charge.  “That doesn’t sound like the FEV, Captain.  It must be something else.”

Captain?  Their technology made me think they were Brotherhood or simple raiders.  An organized system of rank suggested otherwise.  Whatever they chose to do with me, I was unlikely to change their minds, so I dared to ask, “Who are you?”

Laser lowered her weapon enough that I could see her clearly.  She was tall, probably six feet barefoot, and currently wearing power armor that had been dirtied intentionally until all identifying marks were obscured.  Her face was thin and severe with brilliantly orange hair cut so short as to seem masculine.  Her dark eyes bored into me with a wary glare.  “I am Captain Regina Baines, this is Casey Romero,” she nodded towards the other woman who had spoken, “and Phoebe Emerson.”  

She volunteered no further information and I prompted, “Captain of…?”

Regina ignored me.  “You were shot by the Brotherhood of Steel, correct?  Did they follow you to this area?”

“The Brotherhood appear to be everywhere in this region; if you wish to hide from them I have the same desire and have not succeeded for long.”

“Are you suggesting an alliance?”

“If that would be to our benefit.”  I shifted in the chair, turning my wrists and realizing that I could easily escape the rope bindings if I wanted to.  “I am on my way north, to a place called Walden Pond.  If you are traveling the same way, we may be able to help each other.”

Casey spoke up.  “We already saved your life, I think you owe us a—”

Regina silenced her.  “Lieutenant!”  She lowered the gatling the rest of the way and nodded behind me.  Someone began to untie my wrists and ankles.  “You have no affiliation with any group, do you know why the Brotherhood wants you dead?”

That seemed like two separate questions.  I shook my head.  “No, I do not.  And I have no affiliation with any group which still exists.”  I couldn’t hide the bitterness in my tone and Regina gave an understanding nod.  

“We find ourselves in a similar situation.”  She stepped back, giving me room to stand and rub my wrists where the rope had left marks.  “You’ve read Thoreau?”

“What?”

Regina had a strange note to her voice in that question, as if it held some significance or surprise beyond the obvious.  Perhaps she was just surprised that I could read.  Right now I took the opportunity to look around the small basement and thus found myself distracted from the implications of her question.  

It must have been used for canning pre-war; every wall held shelf upon shelf of dusty jars, some opened and empty, but most still intact.  As well hidden as the entrance had been, I could see this being an excellent hiding place.  If they were not found, these women could survive here for years, and perhaps that was their plan.  A single lantern lit the room, revealing three bedrolls stretched out on the ground against the back wall.  Casey wore power armor as well, and carried a plasma caster.  She looked reasonably pretty, and young, somewhere in her mid-twenties.  Her light brown hair had become matted and dirty, but hygiene was probably not her chief priority with the Brotherhood so close by.  Their advanced technology made them a target, no doubt.  At the time I expected no other reason for the Brotherhood’s interest in these women.  

Unlike the others, Phoebe, who had not yet spoken, wore no armor.  She knelt on her bedroll beside the lantern, watching me and holding some kind of manual with a plain black cover.  Even kneeling, she was clearly taller than myself, perhaps taller than Regina, and like Casey, I suppose she would be considered attractive.  Phoebe, however, unsettled me a little because of whom she so strongly resembled.  Next to the lantern, I could see her eye color clearly: bright green, a shade I had only ever seen on one other person.  Her long wavy hair cascaded over her shoulders, clean enough that it stood out as bright and pale blonde.  

Regina asked another question, and I heard her although I was more focused on Phoebe.  “Thoreau, he wrote The Walden.  You have read his work, haven’t you?”

“Yes.  A friend of mine is more familiar with it.”  My gaze never left Phoebe and I addressed her, “Do you have relatives in Nevada?”

Before I finished my sentence, all of the women had tensed, and relaxed in unison when I reached the “d” of Nevada.  Phoebe shook her head and Regina answered.  “We have no relatives, as far as we know.”  There was a mystery here, but I did not have the luxury of investigating right now.  I should keep moving soon before the Brotherhood found me.  

Regina handed me my weapons and rucksack, which they had removed to interrogate me.  “You should leave now.  Walden is far North of here, you have a long way to go.”  The curiosity I had inspired by mention of the Walden had dissipated and now all three women clearly wanted me gone.  I did not wish to overstay my welcome, surrounded in close quarters by so many energy weapons.  I nodded farewell and was on my way again.  

*       *       *

Coyote came back to the house pretty late that night.  The kids didn’t want to go outside most days and after the vertibird, Jay wouldn’t even go near the windows and Israel wouldn’t leave them.  Coyote said Jay had always been a timid child and that had gotten worse.  She’d built a fort from old boxes beside her bed and I had to coax her out of it to eat.  At least she was safe, I guess.  I could’ve used a kid like Israel as a lookout back in Little Lamplight; he had a set of binoculars he hardly ever put down.  If he wasn’t reading, he sat by the window, watching the Commonwealth and pointing out anything interesting.  He’d given names to the super mutants a few blocks away; he was afraid of them, but he felt safe with so many walls between us.  The boy could spot things more quickly than I could.  He had binoculars, but still.  He’d probably be a great sniper one day.  I guess he’d inherited that from Coyote.  

However innocently he smiled, I’d known Coyote was a tough bastard even before I’d seen him fight.  He’d started living on the streets of Goodneighbor, half-starved with two young kids, a machete, and an anti-materiel rifle and he’d managed to keep all of the above.  He could look terrifying when he wasn’t smiling, nobody living in Goodneighbor was ever harmless.  Sure the guy grinned like he’d taken six hits of jet, but people weren’t afraid of him just because he was crazy.  Some guy had tried to rough him up a few days after he’d arrived.  The asshole hadn’t realized that Coyote knew Hancock, but he also hadn’t known how Coyote fought.  Big, burly guy almost as tall as Coyote was, and carrying a crowbar?  He’d been gutted before he’d seen the gleam of that machete blade.  

Coyote stretched out across my chest.  The kids had been asleep for a few hours after Coyote had put them to bed a second time because they’d heard him return.  Now the house was quiet and, as usual, that made Coyote feel like talking.  I didn’t mind.  I didn’t really want to sleep right now either.  

He had me in an awkward position: I’d mentioned my Gunner problem a few days ago, after he’d seen them harassing me, and to my surprise, Coyote practically took it personally.  When I’d first seen him, I’d figured he was just a tough farmer or maybe an ex-raider, but he was something else.  I’d actually asked if he’d used run with the Gunners as well after I’d seen him fight for the first time, after he’d said no, I just figured he was a very good merc, like myself.  A few people had met him before he’d moved here.  Some of the traders and settlers told me he’d been a pacifist, impossibly enough.  He’d changed recently, and everyone knew why.  I just couldn’t imagine Coyote as a pacifist.  I mean, the idea was crazy on its own, but something about him seemed too… militant.  He’d run with some kind of gang at some point, maybe even been a soldier somewhere, and yet he still passed as a saint when he wanted to.  I’d known him for barely a week and he just… he captivated me.  Sometimes, he seemed so impossible, but on the other hand, there were a lot of ways that I wished I was more like him.  

I wanted to get the cure for Duncan, and I knew if I mentioned that to Coyote, he’d charge a pack of deathclaws to get it, but if we ran off to Med-Tek…  We’d gotten a guard Coyote trusted to watch the kids the other day, but that only worked for a day.  If we went there and didn’t come back, they’d be alone, and I couldn’t let that happen.  It didn’t help that when Coyote smiled at me, he… he really reminded me of Lucy.  

He was smiling at me now.  He looked absurdly peaceful, especially given what I knew he’d been through in Sanctuary; I would have thought he was high if I hadn’t known that he didn’t even drink.  I chuckled.  “You know, you look really harmless for a guy who kills people for a living.”

His smile vanished and then returned in a somewhat uncertain way.  “And you have a very bad reputation for a nice guy.”  He slid off the foot of the bed and stood, running a hand through his hair and pacing.  He walked even more quietly than I did when I wanted to be stealthy.  

I sat up to frown at him.  “What?”

“I’m not always the most perceptive about these things, but you seem to think being a mercenary is a bad thing.”

I cocked my head.  “This from the guy who doesn’t care about caps and doesn’t enjoy killing?”

“I don’t care about caps,” Coyote admitted, “and I try not to enjoy killing, but being a mercenary isn’t inherently evil.” I opened my mouth and he must have expected the protest, even though right now he was staring out the window.  “Look, RJ, there are worse things than being a mercenary.  As a merc, nobody’s forcing you to take the contract.”

I snorted.  “Tell that to the Gunners.”

He turned fast enough to startle me.  “You _left_ the Gunners.  There are worse things to be, harder things to leave.”

“I get the feeling you’re not just trying to cheer me up.”

He sat down on the side of the bed and then lay back across my legs, stretching his arms all the way to the wall.  Stretched out like that, the moonlight highlighted his muscles and scars.  Aside from the cuts on his chest, he had a large cross on his lower abdomen and the misshapen knob of his knee.  The cross looked like surgery.  I had no idea what had happened to his knee.  

I ran a hand through his wild hair and let him take his time.  

“I was a soldier in an army called the Legion.”

Jeez, the guy just showed me up in every way, didn’t he?  I guess he realized how that sounded to me.  

“That wasn’t a good thing.”  He frowned at me and then stared back out the window, looking out over the relatively quiet city.  Somewhere in the distance a mutant hound howled and the howl received an eerie, high-pitched reply.  Must be some feral dog.  “There was a war.  I hunted the enemy with a man I trusted with my life.  We’d both been raised as soldiers since we were very young, it was all we knew.  We’d hunt down, torture, and kill the enemy.  He ran the covert operations of the entire army; when we weren’t on a mission ourselves, he organized the bombing of a train, the deadly irradiation of a large military base, and the massacre of civilians.  The empire we served relied heavily on slave labor and utilized brutal punishments.  They executed and enslaved whole tribes under their banner.  The Gunners are cuddly by comparison.”  

It took me a moment to process all that.  Maybe he wasn’t so perfect after all.  “Damn… Yeah, you…you may be right about that.”  

Coyote fell silent.  After a moment he got up, paced restlessly, stared out the window, and then lay down beside me.  That gave me enough time to really think about what he’d said.  

“You said it was hard to get out of that gig?”

He snorted.  “Less of a gig, more of a way of life, but yes.  My friend…well, he probably died or he’s still with them now.”

“How’d you get out?”  I mean, I’d just walked out on the Gunners… and subsequently killed a bunch of them with Coyote.  If this was more difficult, I imagined him taking out half an army until they cut their losses.  I wouldn’t be too surprised if that had been the case.  The guy seemed like he could rip a behemoth limb from limb, if he wanted to.  

“They think I’m dead.”  Something out the window caught his eye and he sat up to study it.  After a few minutes, his tense posture relaxed and he continued, “There was a flood, I’d thought that it killed my companion, but it didn’t  We got separated and he thought I’d drowned.  I nearly did.  I wandered around for a while, I didn’t eat much, didn’t trust anyone, and ended up half-dead in a city.  Vegas, specifically.”  He’d mentioned the Mojave and Vegas many times.  I’d already figured that he’d lived out there.  I’d asked what it was like and the picture he painted left me with the image of a sleazy well-lit city in the middle of a redder, drier, wasteland that was mostly rocks and dirt.  It sounded awful with all that dust.  

Coyote didn’t talk much unless you got him started on the old books he’d read, so I hadn’t expected this sudden stream of information.  Usually, the guy mention his past in as few words as possible.  It was weird; I felt like I knew him so well, and now he was going on for ages about things he’d never told me before.  He’d sounded grim for most of his explanation, but now his face lit up the way it did when he talked about that guy who’d lived alone in the woods before it was cool.  

“I met this doctor in Vegas, who saved my life.  I…”  His voice broke and he got up again, this time walking over to his bag in the corner and digging out an apple.  I’d thought he had some kind of visual aid, but I guess he was just hungry.  Coyote wasn’t quite as strange as he seemed at first glance, but he was still a pretty weird and mysterious guy.  He leaned against the wall and ate a few bites before continuing his story.  “We were… really close.”  He took another bite of the apple and then gestured with it.  “Stuff happened about six years ago, and I came out here.  I don’t really know what happened to anyone out west.”  

I did the math.  His children were about six years old.  Duncan was younger than them, but Coyote was a few years older than me, so I figured our lives had gone pretty similarly.  We’d both fought a lot when we were younger, maybe taken on tasks and responsibilities well beyond our years, killed a lot of people, met a girl, in my case gotten married, maybe he just hadn’t gotten around to it, and had kids.  Out here with just those kids and no one else, their mother was probably was dead.  The way he talked about that doctor he’d mentioned, I figured she’d been their mother.  He’d married, or at least been really committed to her, the way he talked about her.  Something drastic must have happened, hell, maybe that was why he’d been a pacifist for a while.  

Coyote was a fucking mindreader.  He’d been standing by the window while he ate the apple (core and all) but when he finished, he turned back to look at me and asked, “Did you ever have a family?”

I frowned at him.  “Like… parents?  Or kids?”

“Kids.”  He washed his hands and climbed back into bed.  “You just seem like…  I don’t know.  You’re good with kids.  Like…  Like you had a little brother or something.”  

“Yeah.  I, uh… I got a son back in the Capital Wasteland.”  I hadn’t mentioned Duncan because of his illness and Med-Tek; I hadn’t told Coyote about Lucy just because… well… I guess I just wasn’t ready to tell him yet.  But it sounded like he’d been through some pretty similar shit.  Maybe this was just how life went out on the wasteland.  

Coyote cocked his head, lying on his chest, propped up on his elbows.  “You must have had a good reason to leave.  You’ve got the kind of loyalty the…  You’re one of the most loyal men I’ve ever met.”  

Now I was skeptical.  “Yeah.  Says the guy who helped me hunt down my old coworkers.”  

He shrugged.  “No offense, the Gunners are assholes.  The fact that you stayed with them as long as you did shows some serious commitment.”

I sighed softly.  “Yeah.  I had a good reason to leave my kid.”  I didn’t really want to tell him.  The more I thought about it, I was sort of okay to tell him about Lucy.  At least, he really seemed like he’d understand and I wanted someone to… to talk to about that kind of thing, but telling him about Lucy didn’t risk him running off on some crusade.  Unless he was going to try to cleanse the world of ferals.  I mean, I wouldn’t put it past him…

Coyote must have realized I didn’t want to talk about it.  He stretched out and closed his eyes.  I swear the guy never really got tired.  He always had bags under his eyes like he hadn’t slept in years, even if the rest of him looked great.  We’d watched his kids together one night when the mutants and the raiders were fighting and they couldn’t sleep.  I could force myself to stay awake pretty well, but Coyote didn’t even seem interested in sleeping.  Ever.  It was like he could just turn that off.  

It creeped me out a little, but knowing that, I didn’t feel bad to continue our conversation.  I didn’t want to just go to bed after shutting him out like that.  “Hey…”  Coyote opened his eyes again and turned his head, looking at me patiently with his chin buried in the pillow.  He’d actually made these pillows himself, shooting twenty or so ravens and sewing the feathers into old shirts.  They were comfy enough to ignore the smell.  “I had a wife back in the Capital Wasteland…”

*       *       *

The next morning came way too soon.  I was very used to a lack of sleep, but I never enjoyed it.  Between my work in the Legion and my paranoid vigils over my children, I’d rarely slept easily.  In Vegas, I had slept in, or at least slept eight hours, almost every day.  It was the one place where I’d really been able to live a safe and healthy life, ironically enough.  Even with MacCready, I found it difficult to relax.  After Sanctuary, I kept having nightmares.  I’d woken uneasy for years from memories of water and darkness, now it was even odds for vivid dreams of bleeding children.  I _saw_ Raven and Fox, but I dreamed Jay and Israel just as often.  I’d lost too many people.  

I wouldn’t leave my kids, but I found that I also needed to look after anyone else I cared about.  Abraham was gone, at least the Abraham I’d liked was gone, he’d died when he cut Raven apart.  Hancock had heard what happened before he’d reached Sanctuary.  I’d found him in Goodneighbor.  We were never that close, but a sort of bond formed when two people lost a friend and I guess we had that.  Even if the town I lived in hadn’t relied on him, I wanted him to be okay.  I still had the kill-or-be-killed mentality, redoubled after Sanctuary, but beneath that, I cared more than I probably should have.  I could see everyone as a person, if I let myself, and it wasn’t easy once I did that to accept that I couldn’t protect them all.  That was why I didn’t like to let myself see people that way.  When I met someone, they were a threat first, and scenery if they left me alone.  My kids were my children, they were always people.  I’d lived alone with them because I knew I couldn’t protect more than us.  I’d had to leave the Mojave, and I’d had to leave Denver, but in the Commonwealth, I hadn’t wanted to open up.  When I was alone with my kids, I only had to protect that small family.  But Abraham had found me, and I’d opened up to him.  And then he introduced me to other people, and we became a family, a community, all of us.  They stopped being scenery and I let them be people to me, and I cared about them.  And that blew up in my face.  I had tried not to do that in Goodneighbor.  

I guess I ended up taking after MacCready a bit.  Before I’d met him, I’d hid.  I’d stayed inside and kept to the fringes so no one would see me and no one would recognize me.  And then I’d met him, and let myself see him as a person, and started dealing with the raiders and other hazards of the Commonwealth.  I had to start selling what I brought in, had to deal with people as more than a feature of the landscape.  I tried to be gruff.  I put on this show of the cruel, single-minded mercenary and hoped nobody would see through it, but they already knew me.  I guess word had got out when I’d been a pacifist and everyone heard what happened and why I was here, with two of four kids.  Gossip spread like wildfire and the tortured father was too widely known to keep them out.  Even in Goodneighbor, I got sympathy, perhaps pity, and more and more faces stopped being threats or terrain and became human beings.  Even that assaultron.  And I really didn’t like robots.  

The more people I let in, the more I had to fear, and I’d already lost a lot.  Even beyond my kids and my pack, I wanted to know at least what had happened to Vulpes and, more importantly, Arcade.  The wasteland being what it was, I didn’t expect I’d ever find out, but not a single day passed when I didn’t wonder about them.  I missed Geiger as well, and he would have been helpful to cross the wastes, but Liberty had needed him more than I did.  

MacCready was a different sort of friend.  I hadn’t planned to open up at all, and I still hadn’t told him that I used to be a woman, but I might.  He served the same purpose as Vulpes: a friend I trusted and sometimes slept with, who had my back in battle and could take half the watch.  Except now we were watching my kids rather than each other.  That said, they were completely different people.  Vulpes had been all Legion, absolutely focused, this perfect balance of lethal grace and an almost playful wit.  MacCready, on the other hand, was coarse but kind of adorable once you got to know him.  It was like comparing a cat and a dog: Vulpes was deadly elegance in a relatively unassuming package and MacCready had all that big, tough attitude but a cuddly, loyal nature underneath it.  I’d trusted Vulpes with my life, but he’d never been the confiding type.  From when we’d first met, I’d known that MacCready somehow understood the fear of trying to protect someone in the wasteland.  Maybe that was his wife, maybe his son, maybe both, I didn’t know for certain, but he understood, and he let me ease that worry even when neither of us talked about it directly.  Right now, after Sanctuary, I really needed someone like that.  

Last night eased that worry immensely, even if it hadn’t helped my sleep depravation.  I’d never felt so good on so little sleep.  I woke first, checked on the kids and left.  There was someone I needed to check on before I had to watch Jay and Israel.  I didn’t expect that he’d drop by the Third Rail; he’d barely gone downstairs since Abraham had lost it.  

~       ~         ~

Fahrenheit had given up for the day, already.  She stood guard, looking more haggard than usual and let me in with a grim nod.  I found Hancock passed out under a curtain that had either fallen or been yanked off the window.  He was high, on jet _and_ mentats, judging from the smell and empty packages around him.  I sat down on the floor beside him.  I could his heart beat, even if it was a fast and irregular, he was at least alive.  He’d ransacked this room a little more today.  It had been wrecked the first time I’d come here to check on him, after Abraham went nuts, and it got a little worse every visit.  I leaned back against a broken picture frame and watched the sunlight slowly brighten through the windows.  

A groan told me when Hancock woke up.  I heard his fingers scrambling for more mentats before I looked over.  I spoke, but didn’t stop him.  “You know, this isn’t the best coping technique.”

“Fuck you.”  He took a handful of mentats and met my gaze groggily.  “Just stopping by again to make sure I’m alive?”

“Something like that.”  I stood up.  The mess was starting to bug me.  “This town still needs you, you know.  After what happened, this is about the only place left for people to feel safe.”

He scoffed.  “Safe?”

“Relatively safe.”  I righted a table and started tidying things up as much as possible with a room this trashed.  “Seriously, people need you.  Things aren’t getting any better out there.  Pull yourself together.”

He glared at me, still on the floor, but now leaning against the wall to look at me.  “How the hell do you get off being so happy all the time?!  You’ve been through shit too, what the fuck are you?”

I sighed, one hand on the desk I’d just put back in order.  I let myself stop focusing on the task at hand and felt the pain show on my face.  “I’m not happy.  You’re right, I’ve been through shit, more than you probably know, and I’m sad, and I’m terrified, but life goes on.  There’s shit to do, and I focus on that.  I sing, I fight, I stop by to make sure you don’t drug yourself to death, and I clean obsessively.  And sometimes, after a while, I can manage to forget everything I’ve been through and really be happy.  Would Abraham want you to just sit here feeling sorry for yourself?”

He kept scowling, but now he looked more sad than hateful.  “Abraham’s fucking psychotic.”

“No argument there.”  I dug a chair from a pile of debris and tried to right it before I realized it was missing a leg.  “He used to be a good man, he just couldn’t deal with how much the world had changed.”

“What are you, some sort of shrink?”  He tried and failed to stand before settling back onto the floor and closing his eyes.  He wasn’t asleep, just enjoying the high.  

“I’ve been a spy most of my life, still got the instincts.”  Hancock opened his eyes again and quirked an eyebrow.  “I’m usually very good at reading people.  I should have seen it coming.”

“Nobody expected that shit to go down like it did.”  He hadn’t known I’d been a spy, but he didn’t say anything about that.  

I shrugged.  Maybe if I hadn’t been so blind and trusting, I would have noticed the signs.  

Hancock rolled onto his knees again and this time he managed to get up.  “Look, Coyote, you’re a fucking amazing parent, hauled your kids out here from California or wherever, stop beating yourself up about this.”

“Only if you stop hiding up here and start being mayor badass again.”  I could tell from his stare that he was torn between punching me for implying he was a coward and laughing because I’d called him mayor badass.  

He settled on a rough pat on the back.  “Fine.  I’ll work on it.  Just stop rearranging the furniture.”

“What, hurricane chic is all the rage these days?”

He snorted and nudged me towards the door.  “Yeah.  Really like the whole place looking as ugly as my sorry mug.”

“Come on, man.”

“Hey, I’m off the floor, that’s something.”  He shuffled through the mess to his desk.  “Don’t you have your ankle-biters to look after?”

I nodded, accepting his point.  “Take care of yourself, Hancock.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

It was more of a response than I usually got, and at least this time he’d seemed like I might have gotten through to him.  I got where he was coming from, but I hadn’t expected him to take what had happened as badly as he did.  I guess I just moved on more easily.  And with less drugs and booze.  I didn’t expect any real change anytime soon.  

*       *       *

With the survivor on a rampage, business was bad.  He’d been showing up all over the place, usually in power armor, and just beating the shit out of anything he found.  Sometimes that was ferals or synths, and I didn’t object when that was the case, but most of the time it was people.  Folks had started flocking to any place they could feel safe from him and most of the time, that was either Goodneighbor or the Castle.  Hardly anyone dared leave town, even the traders, so lately the only job I’d gotten had been Coyote, hiring me to watch his kids.  They were good kids, and the pay really was better than what I made on my own, but I’d like to actually get some mercenary work, and today that just wasn’t happening.  

I’d never met anyone quite like Coyote.  One day he’d gut six Gunners in five minutes and the next he’d put on his suit and take over Magnolia’s place in the Third Rail.  That’s where he was now, singing.  The guy belted it like one of the people on old world holotapes, I mean, I didn’t care too much about music, but he sounded great.  With no real jobs right now, I ended up in the bar as well, drinking and listening to him.  

After last night, I’d sort of expected some kind of reaction from him.  I mean, he’d talked, it wasn’t like he’d ignored me, but Coyote being Coyote, I’d expected some kind of discussion of his own past love.  He had one, obviously.  He had kids, but it wasn’t just that; he sang all these old love songs and it just wasn’t possible to sound that heartfelt if he didn’t know the feeling, right?  I mean, maybe I was wrong, but… Coyote really seemed like he got where I was coming from with this.  I felt like I knew him so well, and then, stuff like this happened, and I just wasn’t sure what to make of him.  It had been bothering me all day that I didn’t really know his reaction to Lucy.  Last night, I’d even admitted that, as much as I missed her, I cared about him.  He agreed, but the more I thought about it, the more I wasn’t sure if he really got what I meant.  I mean, we were sleeping together and I wanted to think that…  Though, I never actually _said_ it either, so maybe he was just the same way.  Why couldn’t this be more simple?  

Up at the mic, Coyote had Jay and Israel on the couch nearby where he could keep an eye on them.  Israel had a book, as usual, and Jay was putting on some silent play with a few pre-war toy cars.  As rough as the Third Rail could be, everyone in town knew Coyote, and even if they didn’t sympathize with him, they’d heard what he could do with that machete he still carried sheathed on his belt.  Nobody was going to touch, or let anyone else touch, his kids.  And without any sign of anyone who might hire me, I kept an eye on them as well.  

They really were great kids.  I hoped that in a few years I could watch Duncan play like this.  Hopefully he’d be healthier than Israel, but really I’d be happy as long as he survived.  Maybe somehow I’d get into Med-Tek again and be able to bring Duncan up here to join them.  

Somebody opened the door upstairs and Israel craned his neck, a little more eager than usual in his people-watching.  I don’t think he was very interested in this particular book.  Or he was just bored of reading all the time.  Who could blame him?  I couldn’t hear any footsteps on the stairs as Coyote started up his next song.  Heartaches by the Number.  Again _._   I guess it must have some kind of significance for him, but _jeez_.  

A man walked into the bar.  He wasn’t that tall, he wasn’t really imposing, but something about him just gave me the chills.  He wore black combat armor and carried only two weapons and a small backpack.  He had a machete, but my gaze lingered on his gun.  It was one of those hypno-things slavers used back in the Capital Wasteland.  Of course, he barely glanced around before focusing directly on the kids.  If he drew that thing, he was dead.  

Israel had watched him walk in and the boy had frowned as this guy stepped into the dim light of the bar.  Jay hadn’t even realized they were being watched.  From my angle, I couldn’t see the newcomer’s face after he turned towards the duo, and Coyote was too into his song to notice right now.  In a way, that was sort of good, he’d been so paranoid that he wouldn’t eat when I’d met him, but right now he could stand to pay a little more attention.  He figured out something was off when I stood up and he followed my gaze to his kids.  

The guy had sat down beside Israel and started talking to him and Jay, chatting like he wasn’t a slaver in all likelihood about to kidnap them.  Coyote fell silent mid-song, his face dropping in shock that I mistook for horror.  When the music cut off everyone in the bar saw what was happening.  Hands went to guns and I’m pretty sure I wasn’t the only guy expecting a slaughter.  

The man looked around, not bothering to stand not even reaching for his weapon, but showing no sign of fear or surrender.  He met each gaze with the kind of cold superiority that had more than a few folks lowering their guns and backing away.  Israel and Jay had fallen silent, staring nervously around the bar.  Most kids would have screamed.  Maybe it was just what they had been through that kept them silent.  The stranger focused on me and seemed to size me up in the second before Coyote stepped over to him.  

“Vulpes?”

Wait, Coyote knew this guy?  I tore my gaze from the stranger to my partner and saw him smiling uncertainly.  He knew this guy.  Maybe this was someone from Sanctuary, or some trader I hadn’t heard of before, Coyote seemed happy to see him.  Actually, he looked _very_ happy to see him.  And shocked.  It wasn’t all that rare around here to think somebody was dead and find out they weren’t, but I started to suspect…  

The slaver just looked confused, but Coyote had relaxed completely.  I hadn’t lowered by rifle and he waved it away.  “It’s okay, RJ, this is the guy I mentioned before.  The one I spent a lot of time traveling with.”  That sparked recognition in the slaver’s eyes.  He tilted his head curiously but I spoke first.  

I lowered my rifle but didn’t put it back over my shoulder.  “I sort of suspected.”  I mean, I wasn’t one to talk, but this guy had bad news written all over him and after what Coyote had told me, I wouldn’t trust him around kids even unarmed.  

*       *       *

In seven years, Coyote had become unrecognizable.  After what Gannon had told me, I had come to accept that he wanted to be a man, even if it still unnerved me, and the idea that I might find him here had led me to imagine what Coyote might look like now.  I had pictured the slender, very feminine woman I had known with a bound and thus flatter chest, likely in armor, but with her hair as long as ever and a shape still best described as hourglass.  In seven years, the person I found before me had cut his thick black hair short, which left it wild and spiky.  His slender body had developed the sharply defined muscles of a praetorian and his already angular face had subtly taken on an even more masculine appearance.  Even aware of his gender, I could not distinguish anything beneath his suit to suggest his female self.  Perhaps most disturbing, aside from the fact that his voice was now significantly lower than my own, was the scruffy goatee and accompanying stubble on his chin and jaw.  By what unholy science was this the woman that I loved?  

But my shock did not end there; I had not even planned to find Coyote here.  I had yet to reach Walden and had simply stumbled upon Goodneighbor while seeking a place to rest and resupply before the last leg of my journey.  As much as I tried not to use my heightened sense of smell, especially here, in this city of vice with mildly less filth than Vegas, I had detected a near human scent too similar to my own to be coincidence.  I’d detected two of them.  

I’d followed that smell into the Third Rail, unaware of Coyote’s presence or even why anyone related to me might be in the area.  With my tribe wiped out, I had no living ancestors and after the dam I had no reason to believe that any possible children of mine would still exist.  I had found a boy and a girl who were unmistakably the product of one of my unions with Coyote.  Coyote had told me that she— _he_ could not have children and I had believed that.  Why would he have lied?  

My practiced facade of calm veiled my emotions, but I felt my jaw tense.  Why hadn’t Coyote ever mentioned this?  Why hadn’t she sought me out after the flood?  Even if she thought I was dead, she could have searched!  She had told _no one_ —!  …wait.  The doctor had spoke of Coyote being ill, an illness unrelated to what we both had.  He had known.  He had known and he had not told me, he had not even told me her name, her real name.  

*       *       *

“…Vulpes?”

If I didn’t know better, I’d swear this guy was a synth.  His eyes had barely widened when he’d seemingly recognized Coyote and now he just had his jaw set like he wanted to punch something.  Creepy as hell remained his best descriptor.  Especially when he fell silent for nearly a minute and just stared at Coyote, processing the situation.  This guy had more than a few screws loose.  

He finally snapped out of it and spoke.  I hadn’t heard his voice over the music, but the pitch and the gravely tone sure amped up the creepy factor.  “We need to talk.”  

Coyote’s grin became an awkward one and he ran a hand through his hair.  “Yeah.  Yeah, we really do.”


	18. A Light Shining in Darkness

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Coyote has rarely felt more awkward.

We reached Walden Pond in some of the thickest fog I’d ever seen. I lost track of time but I’d estimate the whole trip took about forty days. Like this was some kind of biblical journey. It wasn’t a desert, but I had more or less been alone. I had Geiger, but a deathclaw wasn’t much for conversation and I didn’t talk to anyone else on the journey east. No one approached us and I hadn’t sought them out. Go figure, a guy with a gauss rifle, power armor, and a deathclaw wasn’t the type people approached for a chat. We scared off pretty much everything. We had to fight a grand total of twelve raiders in the entire trip, and only because they were too strung out to back off. Geiger made short work of them. Between the two of us, the trip wasn’t difficult, not in terms of survival, anyway. I hadn’t considered what would happen if I never found Coyote and honestly, I tried not to think about it. The only thing that kept me going right now was my focus on that goal. I’d find him at Walden and we’d figure things out from there.   
We heard voices before we realized where we were. It was morning, the dim light of dawn diffused through the mist, hiding anything ahead and obscuring our own forms but not the glow of my armor and Geiger’s… well, Geiger. A raider stepped out of some sort of house and pointed a rifle our way. As usual, the deathclaw took point and I followed a bit behind him because I had a gun and he used his claws, so the raider focused on his moving glow first.   
“Alright, hand over everything you’ve got and nobody gets hurt!”  
Geiger stepped towards him.   
“What, cat got your—?” The shape of glowing green horns must have become apparent because the raider stopped talking and started shooting. Geiger was on him before he emptied the small clip and I only drew my own rifle because the raider had yelled for help. In six minutes we killed six raiders and I stopped to look around.   
What I’d mistaken for a house proved to be a gift shop, and the displays made it clear where we were. I ran outside and found the famous cabin in the sea of white. Empty. Empty for a long time, except for the raiders. There was dried blood on the steps. I tried not to read into it too much. I didn’t hear anything, I couldn’t see more than a few feet. There had to be some way to find him…   
“Geiger…”   
I turned towards the deathclaw and found him sniffing the ground with his back to me. He whistled, the low mournful cry that equated to a whimper from him. My heart sank, but I had to be sure.   
Stepping around Geiger, I found him nosing a patch of recently turned earth. Leaves had blown over the grave, but nothing had grown there yet. He’d died anywhere from a week to a few months ago. I might have thought that someone had just dug a hole, or maybe this was the work of molerats, except for a makeshift cross, two broken branches nailed together and planted as a grave-marker. There was no name. There didn’t need to be.   
Or maybe there did. After nuzzling the dirt hard enough to leave a clear impression of deathclaw snout, Geiger sprang up, rearing onto his hind legs and sniffing furiously as the wind picked up. He whistled again, not a cry of sorrow, but an alert.   
“What is it?”  
Two tons of suddenly eager deathclaw bounded down the hill, splashed into water, and I heard another sharp, beckoning whistle from below. I didn’t really know what else to do. Part of me wanted to stay, to get out of my armor and stand by the grave and maybe think of some way to sort of pay my respects, but that wasn’t a long-term plan. I had no plan. Following my deathclaw companion at least gave me something to do and he sure seemed excited about this.   
I tried to think why as I trudged after him. Geiger would scamper along until I could barely see his glow, and then he’d stop and wait while I slogged through muck and leaves and the pond itself to follow him. I’d never seen Geiger this happy since… well, since he’d found me outside of Creede. After walking all this way I’d reached the conclusion that Zion’s tribe had no more welcomed Geiger than anyone else, only Liberty had accepted him. Despite his orders from Zion, he’d left the city, probably at Liberty’s behest or because someone had tricked him. Although smarter than a normal deathclaw, he was only as intelligent as a child, and would no doubt have believed a lie that Zion needed his help, or something similar.   
Wait. Thinking of Geiger as a child, brought it to mind, but if that grave had been Zion’s, then who had buried him? Who had set up the grave marker? His friends (if he had them) and maybe even his kids might still be alive, maybe nearby.   
I picked up my pace, the hydraulics of my armor groaning a bit because I’d neglected their maintenance recently. Geiger ran for hours, tracking by scent as the fog slowly cleared. We passed a group that was probably raiders, heavily armed and watching us but never leaving their shack. I was more disturbed by all the empty farms we walked past. Deserted building weren’t exactly rare in the wasteland, but these showed signs of recent life. Some had footprints still visible in the dust. In a few houses, there were even half-eaten meals on the tables. Shovels and pots lay scattered where they’d been dropped or knocked over. It looked like everyone had left in a hurry, I even caught sight of a few suspiciously blood-like splatters in the grass. People didn’t usually flee from raiders like this, and dangerous animals didn’t leave settlements so untouched. What had happened here?   
Geiger led us to a railroad and turned south, heading towards Boston. We crested a hill and found a house opposite the steel skeleton of what used to be a greenhouse. Smashed metal gleamed among the trees in the ruined farm, but I found myself distracted by a figure on the other side of the tracks.   
A boy crouched in the yard of the house, beside a green truck. He had what looked like a Dinky the dinosaur toy. I didn’t see any adults around, but quickly found out that the kid was not alone. Seeing the boy, Geiger whistled happily and ran towards him. The child, understandably frightened to find a deathclaw running at him, fled back around the side of the house, sheltering behind the man who stepped into view. I admit that, having seen the toy that looked so much like it had come from the Mojave, I almost hoped that the man would prove to be Zion as he turned towards me, but when had things ever worked out happily in my life? I found myself facing a very alarmed man in a brown coat and colonial style hat.   
I rushed to stop Geiger, halting the confused deathclaw by holding my arm in front of him. The man hadn’t even noticed me, and he’d already leveled a strange-looking laser rifle towards Geiger. He didn’t lower it as I insisted, “I’m not here to hurt you, I’m just looking for someone!”  
Surprisingly reasonable for a guy facing down a deathclaw, the stranger lowered his rifle slightly. “Are you with the Brotherhood?”  
My helmet hid my grimace, but I don’t think I could have concealed my disgust even if I’d wanted to. “No.”  
“Good. Honestly, I don’t trust them.” He lowered his rifle the rest of the way, but eyed Geiger nervously. “Is there some reason you’re traveling with a deathclaw?”  
“It’s a long story.”  
“Well, I guess it would be.” He had an edge to his voice. I’d heard that the Enclave out here had used deathclaws as shock troops. Maybe he’d heard that as well.   
After an awkward pause, he held out a hand. “I’m Preston Garvey, minuteman, or maybe the last of the minutemen… again.”  
“Arcade Gannon.” I shook his hand and considered adding a title, but didn’t. I wouldn’t have gone with something serious anyway, just “wandering doctor” or maybe “hopeless romantic.” Emphasis on “hopeless.”   
“You were looking for someone?”  
Right. “Yeah, do you know Coyote?” The boy behind him stepped into view, ignoring me and studying Geiger, who dropped onto his belly submissively. The claws stretched out in front of him sort of ruined the effect. The boy stepped cautiously closer. Getting a better look at the kid, it was obvious this was Zion’s son, and not just because he carried a Dinky the dinosaur. He had dark blue eyes, the same shade as Zion’s, but aside from that this child was the spitting image of Vulpes Inculta. His clothes were basic and he carried a large knife on his belt, but at least it wasn’t a machete. A nasty, jagged scar crossed his throat and I hoped that wasn’t from his own knife.   
Preston followed my gaze and then frowned at me. “Yeah. You know him?”  
“Yeah. We were… we were friends.” The kid stepped forward and carefully pet Geiger’s nose and the enormous deathclaw closed his eyes happily. I think he was just glad to be reunited with Coyote’s family. He had probably seen the kids as infants. Or at least any that survived. Which was probably just this boy. “This is Coyote’s son, right?”  
I was almost certain and Preston could tell. “Yeah. This is Fox. You said you were looking for Coyote?”  
“Yeah?” I feel momentarily hopeful. Maybe, somehow, that grave belonged to someone else. Is he just going to call, and Coyote will be here like nothing happened? I want to believe, but years of training myself to expect the worst came back and I know that my friend lies buried beside Thoreau’s cabin.   
“I don’t know where he is.” Preston looks at Fox and then glances back at the house behind him. The roof’s collapsed, now that I care to notice it. I hear hushed voices inside and somebody looks out the window. “Did you hear what happened?”  
“To Coyote.” I infer. My heart sinks, as if it hadn’t already, and my tone makes my assumption obvious even though he can’t see my face.   
Preston shakes his head. “Coyote’s alive.” Unable to see my incredulous stare, he continues, “He… He left after what happened in Sanctuary. He took two of his kids, but he thought Fox was dead.” He looked over at the kid. “Honestly, between you and me, I didn’t think he’d make it either.”   
Fox, whose name had obvious origins, was too busy petting Geiger to notice our conversation. He’d warmed to the deathclaw after Geiger showed he wasn’t aggressive.   
“That’s how he got the scar on his neck, isn’t it?”  
I guessed and Preston confirmed it with a nod. I presumed that the child had inherited his parent’s healing abilities, he just hadn’t been able to heal quickly enough to avoid the scar. “Fox was… You aren’t from around here, are you? I mean, you don’t seem like you’ve heard.”  
“Heard what?” Evidently, whatever had happened bothered him deeply and knowing the world, it was probably very bad, but I’d left my patience somewhere between here and Vegas. I tried not to be too harsh, but I wished he’d just tell me already. I expected this would lead into where Zion went.   
“There was a… a pretty important man who sort of went berserk a few weeks ago. He slaughtered… well, most people around here, and one of Coyote’s kids. We thought he killed Fox too. Coyote took his other two kids and left, he was sort of… out of it. Understandably. I gathered the rest of the survivors and Fox was conscious again by the time we could leave. I’ve had him with me for a while now.”   
Fox had stopped petting Geiger and was watching us now while the big deathclaw napped beside him. “You knew my dad?”  
“Yeah,” his use of past tense chilled me, but was probably unintentional. “Both your dads, actually.”  
Preston frowned at me. “Both?” It dawned on him before I could explain. “Oh. Well… that explains a lot.”  
“Like what?” Zion had passed damn near perfectly when he’d been pregnant, I couldn’t imagine that there’d be a lot to give him away here. Unless…  
“He barely looked at women, not that that’s a dead giveaway, but he always seemed… He seemed interested in men. And he had some secret surgery a few weeks before it happened. He wouldn’t tell anyone except Abraham.”  
I raised my eyebrows, not that he could tell. “Abraham?” Either the man was Zion’s new lover, in which case I was glad Zion was alive but maybe not so happy I’d made it out here, or he had the skill to perform a sex change on somebody who healed inordinately fast. I’d started to suspect that all of them healed as quickly as Vulpes and Zion had just been hindered by his pregnancy, but even if that was not the case, his healing speed would cause problems. Hell, implants that gave a similar ability made surgery difficult.   
Preston sighed. “Abraham was… He killed a lot of people, mostly in Sanctuary. He used to be a doctor, before the Great War—”  
I tilted my head so he could actually see my confusion. Maybe. If the helmet moved enough for him to notice. “He was a ghoul?”  
Preston shook his head. “No. He was in some kind of sleep for most of that. He seemed like a nice guy, but we could all tell that it got to him. Things had changed a lot from what he was used to. I guess that broke him in the end.”  
If he was a pre-war doctor, that could explain how he’d had the knowledge to perform that surgery, and I guess I wasn’t surprised that someone coming from what the world had been would suffer a psychotic break.   
Fox got up and gave me a puzzled look. “Why does your armor have all those sparkly things?”   
“It’s complicated. They can hurt bad people that get too close, but mostly they just help power energy weapons.”   
“Like what?”  
Go figure, Zion’s son had all his curiosity. Normally, I was all for that, but right now I just wanted to find his father. “Like laser and plasma weapons. And gauss rifles.”  
Fox frowned and noted, “The Brotherhood doesn’t have pretty power armor like that.”  
“Yeah, well the Brotherhood is stupid.” I looked back at Preston and asked, “Do you know where Zion might have gone?”  
He frowned and I realized what I’d said. “I mean Coyote.”  
He smiled a little. “That’s his first name, isn’t it? Zion. Doesn’t that mean something like heaven?”  
“Yeah.” I admitted, “It refers to the Hebrew promised land. Look, Coyote likes to keep his first name secret, he uses it as a sign of trust. I didn’t mean to tell you and I haven’t told anyone else, just forget I said that, okay?”   
“Okay.” He shrugged. “Honestly, I don’t know where he might have gone. He still had two kids with him, so I guess he would have taken them to Diamond City, if they let him in. He doesn’t seem to really understand danger, though, so maybe Goodneighbor?”  
“Are those the largest settlements around?”  
“Well,” he nodded, “after the Quincy massacre…”   
I only waited long enough to be sure he wasn’t going to continue before asking bluntly, “Where are Goodneighbor and Diamond City?”  
Preston pointed. “Diamond City’s south, across the river, and Goodneighbor’s east of that.” I started off and he called after me, “I’ve been trying to move these guys to Diamond City for weeks, but it’s been really slow progress. I’d really appreciate it if you could help us out.”  
I stopped and looked back. This was one guy, with one, weird-looking laser rifle and a six year-old. And evidently some other folks, but none of them had come out so they probably couldn’t fight. I was probably a good idea to get Fox to Zion either way, and I guess it didn’t matter if I took a few more days to get there after the forty I’d already walked. And Geiger hadn’t moved. “Sure.”  
* * *  
With Arcade’s help we made it halfway there before sunset. We stopped at Oberland Station to eat and I tried to convince the farmers that it wasn’t safe out here, but they wouldn’t leave. This had been their farm for generations, they weren’t leaving now. They would rather risk death.   
Arcade was guarded, and I didn’t really trust anyone with power armor and a deathclaw, but he seemed alright. He was a good shot and between him and the deathclaw, apparently named Geiger, we made good time. I’d heard stories of the Enclave, down in the Capital wasteland. They’d never come up here as far as I knew, but power armor and a deathclaw still set off alarms. If I hadn’t been so desperate, I would never have asked for his help.   
If he really was with the Enclave, then maybe they weren’t all bad. We got talking while we walked and Fox rode on Geiger’s back, and he seemed like a pretty nice guy. If I hadn’t thought he might be with the Enclave, I would have asked if he’d be willing to join the minutemen. Hell, after he mentioned that he’d been born in California, I wondered if he might be the kind of person we needed to lead the minutemen, a guy who’d walk across the country had a hell of a lot of willpower, not that he could necessarily lead.   
Mostly, we talked about what was going on in the area, he explained how he’d ended up out here, although I think he glossed over most of the details, and I told him about the minutemen. He seemed to genuinely care about the state of the world and all the people just struggling to get by. And he definitely had some kind of grudge against the Brotherhood and some other group he mentioned from back west. He spoke in this sad sort of tone like he only had one thing left to keep him from giving up hope and if that was the case, I wasn’t surprised. I was pretty much the same way. Months ago, Abraham had found me at my lowest and when he’d gotten us out of there, I’d thought I’d found the man who could save the Commonwealth. But now he was just another monster. I wasn’t sure I wanted to find out if Arcade would be the same way.   
I hadn’t really expected him to get out of his armor. I mean, I didn’t expect him to sleep in it, I guess, I just didn’t anticipate seeing him out of it when we stopped for the night. We took over a ruined house and everyone crowded into the back room and made themselves comfortable on whatever we could find. Geiger stretched out in the hallway, blocking passage as much as guarding us. He couldn’t be seen from the outside, but if anyone opened the door, they’d find themselves right in front of him. Arcade felt safe enough to leave his armor in the space behind the deathclaw, outside of the room were the rest of us were already getting ready for bed. I use the term pretty loosely; we had old clothes, insulation from one of the walls and old papers. Mama Murphy, Sturges, and the Longs had stayed with me, as had Shefield and Art, but most of the settlers at Sanctuary and everywhere else had gone on their own. They hadn’t been through Quincy and they didn’t trust that I could protect them well enough to make it worth the slow progress. I have no idea if any of them survived, but I hoped they did.   
Shefield and Mama Murphy had already gone to sleep when Arcade came into the room after leaving his armor. I don’t know what I expected him to look like, but he surprised me. I’d only met maybe one blonde person in my life, and Arcade’s hair was even brighter. He tilted his head. “What?”  
“I just thought you’d look more military.”  
“I don’t.” He sat down on the paper-strewn floor and leaned his back against the door frame. Sturges was lying down but not asleep and the Longs weren’t even willing to lie down yet. Between the deathclaw and the fact that we’d only just met him, it didn’t matter that Arcade had helped us, he was still a stranger. I didn’t want to point out that we’d known Abraham much longer. Arcade seemed to pick up on the tension, but didn’t seem to care.   
Fox had gotten hungry so he was eating a pack of snack cakes, which was the last food we had, but he’d probably be awake for at least an hour more because of the sugar. He sat on the floor between myself and Arcade, playing with that green lizard toy he had. It was something Coyote had brought from wherever he’d come from. I guess he must have lived out west or maybe in the Capital, but he’d never told me. I wondered how he knew Arcade.   
We sat in awkward silence for a while until Arcade stretched out a little and closed his eyes. I’d lost my capacity for small talk a while ago, and I was tired. I wanted to rest, but I had to watch Fox until he fell asleep. At least I could lie down and be off my feet for a while.   
Once Arcade shut his eyes, the Longs and Sturges went to bed completely, leaving just myself and Fox. I’d kept a few long watches, but I didn’t think Arcade had any intention of hurting us, and Geiger would keep us pretty safe. After Sanctuary, Fox was still a brave and curious kid, but he didn’t seem likely to run off on his own at night. I watched him play for a while, but I wasn’t really worried, so I was barely awake when he started getting tired.   
As one of the tallest men I’d ever met, a fact I hadn’t noticed at first because of his armor, lying with his shoulders propped against the wall and most of his body stretched across the floor, Arcade’s feet almost touched the far wall. He lay against the wall beside the door with his right side against the wall opposite the end of the room where most of the survivors had curled up. I was halfway between them, similarly stretched out across the room because I was completely lying down, and Fox sat between the two of us. We’d found an old coat to serve as his bed tonight and he opened it like he planned to go to sleep. Like most of what we’d found, the coat stank of cigarette smoke and decay, but it was soft. Fox sniffed it warily and made a face. Before I could stop him, he flopped over onto Arcade and snuggled against the man, lying on his chest the way I’d seen him lay on Coyote.   
Arcade opened his eyes so fast I realized he had never actually dozed off, he’d just closed his eyes, probably so the others would relax enough to sleep. He raised his eyebrows, staring down at the sleepy six-year-old on his chest. “Hello?”  
* * *  
Fox wrapped his arms around me and shut his eyes. “You smell nice.”  
Well, that was news to me, considering I hadn’t really showered as often as I should have lately. I sniffed the air and sagebrush and agave explained his comment. Evidently, my lab coat had become permanently imbued with the plants of the desert. “Oh.” I kind of wanted to sleep, but didn’t expect that would happen soon, and I had a question I’d been meaning to ask. “Fox, where did you get that toy? Did your father give it to you?”  
“It’s Dinky.” Fox yawned and snuggled against my coat a bit more closely. “Daddy says he’s from the desert. He says there’s a really big Dinky out there and two snipers live in his mouth!”  
“Well, they don’t live in his mouth—”  
Preston spoke up, “That’s a real story?”  
I hadn’t realized he was still awake. I looked over, noticing in the process that one of the people he’d been escorting had woken up as well, “Yeah, it’s a big statue with stairs and a shop inside. The snipers take turns in the mouth, on lookout for… danger.”  
Fox opened his eyes to watch me as I explained. “Oh. That’s cool. Israel really likes the story about the snipers, but I like hearing about the Boomers better.” Israel. Zion really had named one of his children after my father, or possibly myself, the distinction was difficult to draw as we shared that name. And from the sound of it, Israel was still alive, and with Zion. I think Fox expected a story, but when I didn’t immediately volunteer one, he asked, “Are you from the desert?”  
Apparently, he hadn’t heard the conversation on the way out here. “Well, not exactly, but I lived there for a while, that was where I met your parents.”  
“Cool!” Fox snuggled back into my coat and closed his eyes. He was asleep in seconds. I looked over at Preston.   
“There aren’t really two-headed bears out there, are there?” It wasn’t Preston who asked, but the other man who was awake. He sort of reminded me of the King. I was glad Wolf had at least worked out a truce between the Kings and the NCR. The real King was probably still alive out west. That is, the King who’d taken on the persona and name of the one that had lived in the nineteen fifties.   
“Well, I’ve never seen one. That doesn’t mean they don’t exist, but that was the mascot or rather it was on the flag of a pretty big army out there. I don’t know what Coyote told you, but either he’s seen two-headed bears or he was just toning the war down for his kids.”  
“This is the war you mentioned?” Preston inferred, “With the Legion?”  
I nodded. “The Legion’s symbol was a bull, if he mentioned that.”  
The other man nodded as well, apparently that made sense with what he’d heard. Preston elaborated, “Coyote talked about bulls fighting bears. He told stories to the kids and some of it was pretty much fairytale, but some stories seemed like they might have been real battles. Really, most of it just tried to teach his kids not to fight. I don’t understand how he survived as a pacifist.”  
Now it was my turn to be surprised. “He’s a pacifist?”  
Preston nodded and tilted his head. “He wasn’t when you knew him?”  
I considered his reasons as I answered. “He was a soldier. But he nearly died. And he got in a fight afterwards that nearly killed him and his kids.” It made sense. After violence nearly took away his children and his own life, I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised.   
“Oh.” Preston thought about that. “I still don’t understand how he can just refuse to fight, but I guess that makes it a little more reasonable.”  
I nodded. The man who’d never introduced himself lay back down and closed his eyes. I waited long enough that I’m pretty sure he’d fallen asleep when I asked softly, “Preston, how exactly do you know Coyote?”  
He’d shut his eyes, but he opened them and shrugged. “Honestly, I didn’t know him all that well. I knew he’d be capable of defending Sanctuary, if he tried, so I was pretty persistent about trying to convince him to join the minutemen. He lived in town, and spent most of his time outside in the open, so I saw him fairly often, but he never talked to me very much.” Good. I guess it wouldn’t be terrible if I’d been inadvertently working to reunite Coyote and his lover, but honestly, I’d walked too far. If he was already with someone, that was fine, but I’d rather not help it along. If Coyote had moved on, I wouldn’t be surprised, I just… I don’t think I’d ever find someone else like him.   
Preston watched me curiously, and I guess he inferred why I’d asked. “Did you think we were close because of how I reacted to his name? I just thought it was appropriate. His name basically means heaven and that seems to fit a guy who doesn’t always recognize the realities of the world. If he was a soldier, I guess he understood things better than I thought, but it just isn’t practical not to fight when people are dying out there. I know I can be a bit of an idealist myself, but Coyote just went beyond that.”  
I didn’t realize it at first, but I smiled wistfully. That quixotic mentality was one of the things I liked the most about him. It sounded like it had been less pronounced when I had known him, but people change, and that was okay. If, somehow, I could make it possible for him to keep that philosophy, or maybe a slightly more realistic variant of it, I would do anything to make that so.   
Preston propped himself up on one elbow and tilted his head. “You were more than just friends, weren’t you? I mean, most people don’t walk a hundred miles for a friend.”  
“Actually, it was about three thousand.” I admitted. Between the map I’d found and the somehow-still-functional tracking device in my power armor, I knew the exact mileage. “And yeah. We were… It’s complicated.”  
He lay back down. “Pretty much everything’s complicated nowadays.”  
I sighed. “Truer words have never been spoken.” I stared blankly at the ceiling for so long that I was sure everyone else had already fallen asleep. I’d walked more than halfway across the country on the slim chance that I might be able to find the last living person I cared about and by some miracle he really was still alive, or at least he had been a few days ago. The whole concept seemed crazy, or desperate, now that I thought it over, but at this point I had no other plan. I had nothing else to keep me going. After all this, the pain and loss had faded a little; I didn’t think I’d really kill myself if I didn’t find him, but without some goal, I might well go looking for the Brotherhood on my own. I looked down at the six-year-old fast asleep on my chest. Zion might have moved on, he might not even want to see me, but his son still needed his father. Desperate or not, I had to find him.   
I dozed off eventually and woke when Preston first got up. I don’t think he’d meant to wake anyone, but I was a light sleeper. Evidently Fox was very comfortable on my chest. He slept through the night and I had to wake him in the morning. Aside from his uncanny resemblance to his less pleasant father, he was a great kid. Even when I woke him up, he wasn’t cranky, or even upset that there was no breakfast available; he just climbed onto Geiger and was ready to go. We reached Diamond City before noon.   
I stifled a laugh to find that the settlement was actually built around a baseball diamond, but amusement ebbed as I realized how dangerous the city had to be to force the human population into a baseball stadium. They didn’t want to let us in. They certainly weren’t about to let Geiger in, so we had to leave the deathclaw waiting by the gate with two very uncomfortable security guards. The man who’d spoken to us last night convinced security to let us in on the basis that he could fix pretty much anything.   
“We’ll ask around and see if Coyote is here,” Preston explained, “You’ve been a great help, so if he isn’t, I’ll take you to Goodneighbor. It might be best to leave Fox here, but we should be safe with Geiger.”   
I let Fox ride on my shoulders when we went into the city. I guess the Brotherhood didn’t come here, although we’d seen vertibirds on the way in, because everyone gave me a wide berth. I got a lot of stares and I don’t think it was just because I had tesla power armor. The electricity was off, of course— I only turned it on when I needed to— especially now that the armor was so badly in need of maintenance, but it still gave the suit a distinct look. That and the Enclave emblem on the shoulder.   
* * *  
Boston felt colder when I left the Third Rail. The sun had come out, but it seemed like snow might be on the way again. It didn’t snow as often as I’d expected out here, but the ocean was almost as majestic as I had pictured, whatever MacCready thought of it. I carried Israel and Vulpes walked beside me. He gave his son an unreadable look and with an ache in the pit of my stomach, I suspected I knew what it meant. Jay still didn’t like to leave my side, so she followed right behind me with one hand clamped onto my jacket. I understood that Vulpes was truly shaken by the amount of things he hadn’t known about me and by how much I’d changed, but I had no idea how to even begin telling him about it. MacCready hadn’t let me out of his sight and while I wouldn’t be surprised if he just felt protective, I suspected that this had more to do with the aura of menace that Vulpes constantly emitted. I could tell that he was much more shocked than angry right now, but RJ didn’t know him that well. My mercenary friend almost certainly feared for my safety and as much as I knew Vulpes would kill a lot of the people who might consider him a friend, I had absolute faith that he would never hurt his children or myself. He might well sever all ties with me, but I didn’t expect that either.   
MacCready’s watchful eye didn’t help things right now. I’d explain all this to him later, Vulpes wouldn’t tolerate waiting for an explanation and although MacCready wouldn’t like it either, he had less need to be told.   
We had barely crossed the courtyard when a commotion erupted near the entrance to the town. I set Israel down on the bench I’d moved in front of my house before I figured out what was happening. Vulpes and MacCready both knew me well enough to realize why I was suddenly on edge. Israel had his binoculars up to try and see what all the excitement was about while Jay cowered beside him. I gripped my machete and Vulpes rested a hand on the handle of his gun. MacCready outright drew his rifle, but didn’t aim. We all listened.   
Drunks and refugees fled past us to avoid a fight that had not yet broken out. I didn’t hear Hancock, so he was probably still in his room, but I recognized the voices of several guards and I could hear fear in their normally unshakable voices.   
“Okay, fine,” one of the guards acquiesced, “just keep it under control.”  
Somebody answered in a voice I couldn’t hear clearly or recognize. They might have been wearing a gas mask. From where we stood, in the entrance of the alley outside my house, we would be hidden until an intruder reached the courtyard. I think MacCready and Vulpes both realized this, because neither moved to look around the corner. If the guards were on edge in this dangerous town, this newcomer must be quite a sight. I expected a high-end merc, maybe a Gunner commander, and every possibility I could imagine would be unfriendly to at least one of us. If they didn’t attack, everything was fine, but on the off chance that they proved hostile, or had come here hunting RJ, I wanted to be ready. I drew my machete and saw Vulpes draw his weapons beside me, machete in one hand, strange gun in the other.   
I could hear hydraulics. Power armor. And almost inaudibly, the soft scraping of long claws on pavement. Power armor and a deathclaw. I heard voices talking, one unmuffled by power armor. I lowered my blade. It was Preston Garvey. Had he somehow gotten involved with the Brotherhood? I certainly didn’t expect that he would ever travel with the sort of person who’d be a threat…   
“If he isn’t here, I really don’t know where else to look. Do you think we should just ask around? He’s pretty unique, someone should have noticed him.”  
They passed in front of the alley as the other man answered and although I couldn’t recognize him inside that armor, I would never forget that voice. I dropped my machete and ran at him.   
* * *  
“I guess we—” I fell silent as someone tackled me in a hug with enough force to almost knock me over.   
“Arcade!” I had to take off my helmet to see him clearly. I glimpsed wild black hair and knew it was Zion, even if he still had his face buried in my neck. “What are you doing here? How did you— ? I never expected to see you again!”   
I’d never seen him this emotional. The power armor put me more than a head taller than him; he was on tip-toe to reach my shoulders. When he glanced up I saw tears in his eyes before he dove back into the hug. I barely realized at the time, but I was crying as well. “Coyote! You’re alive!”  
* * *  
Could they just stop hugging, already? Who even was this guy? Vulpes and I exchanged a glance that probably meant something different to him. He still had that blank expression, so I had no idea if he was pissed off or just as confused as I was.   
“Jeez,” I muttered, “Did it get a lot colder out here, or is it just me?” Luckily, I guess, neither of them heard me.   
Even more luckily, a shrill voice interrupted the hugging. “Daddy!”  
A kid who unmistakably resembled Vulpes bolted over the bricks and launched onto Coyote’s leg like an attacking mole-rat. I gave the apparent father a questioning stare and he ignored me. “Okaaay…” Now I had even more questions. Was I dreaming? What the hell was going on today?  
Coyote let go of this newcomer so fast that I thought he’d fainted and dropped into a very awkward half-kneeling position to hug the child. “Fox!! I thought you were dead!”   
My eyebrows rose as it dawned on me. “Oh, sh… wow!” I still had no idea who the adult was, but this explained why Coyote was crying more openly and hugging this kid. It was his freakin’ son. One of the two he’d thought he’d lost in Sanctuary. Why did the boy look like Vulpes? Was the other kid gonna show up as well?   
“Fox!” Jay yelled and scrambled past me to join the hug. I looked back at the bench and found Israel beaming, binoculars lowered, though he couldn’t really run to join them.   
The man in power armor stepped back as the reunion unfolded pretty much on his feet. He had blonde hair. Somehow I noticed that before I recognized his armor. He was Enclave! Freakin’ Enclave! How the hell was Coyote friends with a dick like that?! How the hell did Coyote even know him? Who was this bastard?!  
His gaze passed over myself and Vulpes with tangible awkwardness. He looked almost apologetic, but I knew that couldn’t be the case. Why the fuck had he come here?  
* * *  
Geiger joined the reunion a few seconds after another child dove at her brother and I stepped further back. There was a collective flinch as the deathclaw reached towards them, but everyone relaxed once it became obvious that Coyote was perfectly comfortable with that. Preston nodded at me and went on his way, presumably because he felt even more awkward than I did. And we weren’t alone. I noticed Vulpes and wondered how long he’d been here. Probably not very long, considering the blatant shock and confusion on the face of another, younger man standing in an alley beside him. There was a third kid behind them on a bench, presumably the last of Coyote’s three surviving children. This was Israel. The boy looked as happy as his siblings and father; he was grinning so widely. Though Fox and the girl had black hair, he must have inherited the recessive genes: his hair was bright red, as wild as his father’s, and his blue eyes showed Vulpes’ pale shade rather than Coyote’s deep sapphire blue. I wondered why he hadn’t joined the others and then I saw the twisted and atrophied look of his legs. He wore long pants, probably to hide them, but his condition was obvious on anything more than a glance. This looked like some kind of injury, or else he was paralyzed. This didn’t seem to be polio or any other manner of disease. I wondered if that had happened when Wolf had kicked his father.   
After all this, it had only been a few seconds since we’d arrived, and stirred up the town, and the uproar must have finally reached all the locals because a door flew open on a balcony above us and a ghoul dressed absurdly in Revolutionary War attire called down to us, “Alright, what the hell is going on in my town?!”  
Still beaming, with tears still streaming from his eyes, Coyote shouted back from the pile of children and a deathclaw, “It’s fine, Hancock, they’re with me!”  
The somewhat grumpy, or maybe groggy ghoul raised his lack of eyebrows and shook his head. “Okay, fine, just keep your pet from killing anyone who doesn’t deserve it.” He went back inside and shut the door. Knowing nothing about the town, I wondered for a moment if that might somehow be the real John Hancock and concluded that no, it was probably just a mildly delusional ghoul. Although maybe he was pre-war.   
* * *  
The hugs seemed to go on forever. If he’d still been hugging the guy I didn’t know, I might have gone into the Third Rail already, but I didn’t want to leave Israel alone with this Vulpes guy. As it was, seeing Coyote reunited with the son he’d thought he’d lost made me wonder about Duncan. I didn’t know how much time he had left. I would have liked to have found somebody I knew I could trust, but I couldn’t risk Coyote’s life at Med-Tek, and we suddenly seemed to have a surplus of tough guys Coyote trusted. His trust would have to be good enough for me, I couldn’t risk waiting much longer. I didn’t even know for certain that Duncan was still alive.   
I frowned at the Enclave guy. “Well, you sure know how to make an entrance. Could only be more impressive if you’d brought an airship. I guess the Brotherhood has you beat on that.”  
He scowled just a little. “Well, the vertibird ran out of fuel.”  
A few people around us laughed, I wasn’t sure if he was joking, and Vulpes went as far as to ask. “Really?”  
He shrugged. “Well, it wasn’t completely out, but it wouldn’t have made it back to the dam, let alone out here.” Silence fell as the locals realized he was serious.   
Fox, as impatient as most boys were at that age, got bored with the hug and squirmed until Coyote let him loose. Jay ran after her brother who went over to talk to Israel. Fox gave all of us a cautious look but didn’t stop for fear of getting hugged by Jay. He could outrun her if he kept moving. Coyote watched them and chuckled as Fox stopped to talk to Israel and Jay tackled him onto the bench.   
The ex-soldier rubbed his bad knee as he stood up and patted the nose of the alpha deathclaw like it was just a big dog. I was glad those horns might not fit in the alley I was standing in, but I seriously questioned my lover’s sanity. Coyote said something to the deathclaw and it backed up and lay down, curling up to be as unobtrusive as something that size could possibly be. Left alone in the crowd that had gathered around him, Coyote’s grin became an awkward one. I guess he had even more explaining to do, to all of us.   
After a moment, he said something I couldn’t hear to the man in power armor and headed down the alley towards us while the crowd of locals expecting more drama dispersed. When he walked past us to pick up Israel and open the door to his house, I figured he just wanted to talk somewhere away from prying ears. That was perfect. So did I. Coyote called Jay and Fox and led the whole brood upstairs to the kitchen, where he’d built a table and where we kept the more stationary toys. Mostly, that was paint and board games. The whole house was pretty dirty, like most of the wasteland; paint splatters were an improvement. I let the door close behind me and thought it was just the five of us.   
I followed Coyote upstairs as he showed Fox around and got everyone settled at the kitchen table with water, apples, and the very simple trivia game he’d made to help them learn. I waited in the stairwell and Coyote came back over to me once the kids were focused on each other. “Hey, RJ, I know I have a lot to explain…—”  
“Yeah. You do. But first… Look, our partnership is turning out to be the best thing that ever happened to me—”  
Somebody cleared their throat behind me and I flinched before I turned around. It was Vulpes. “What the hell, man? Can’t you see this is a private conversat—?”  
The guy was unshakable. “Yes,” he answered, perfectly calm, “but I believe I have a much higher priority to find out exactly what has happened since Coyote and I last saw each other.”  
Coyote’s smile dropped into a grimace. “Yes. Sorry, you will, just… give me a moment—”  
A muscle twitched in the side of Vulpes’ brow and I wondered how long he would tolerate waiting. Coyote turned to me, speaking quickly, “RJ—”  
“Look, just hear me out for a minute. There’s something important, but I didn’t want to tell you because I knew you’d risk your life like you did with the Gunners. You trust these guys, right?” I gestured vaguely at Vulpes who narrowed his eyes and might have felt insulted for whatever reason, but I didn’t care.   
Coyote hesitated. “Yeah. I trust both of them completely, why?”


	19. Gears Set in Motion

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Arcade and MacCready don't really get along (probably not surprising). Vulpes turned out to be good with kids. Geiger drives off most enemies, and draws in one big one.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is a little shorted than usual. Also, for some reason the plot of this fic meanders. A lot. My other ones have a more definite plot. Usually. The actual plot might come as a surprise when it really comes into focus, it's been in the background for most of the story. Things will escalate sort of quickly from here on out.

I ended up going to Med-Tek with Arcade and Geiger while Coyote watched his kids with Vulpes.  I didn’t like leaving him alone with that guy, but I knew Coyote could handle himself.  I guess he’d be okay.  I wasn’t much happier about heading into a ghoul-infested laboratory with an Enclave soldier and a deathclaw, but I couldn’t wait any longer.  I needed that cure for Duncan, so I had to risk both.  

Still, I wasn’t thrilled when Coyote explained who would be going where.  At least Coyote’s Enclave friend seemed to have some concern for children, the slaver just gave me the creeps.  I found myself seriously questioning Coyote’s judgement, and not for the first time.  The Enclave guy’s name was apparently Arcade; I couldn’t help but think his parents must have really liked those pre-war games.  I guess Coyote expected him to wear his power armor, but he didn’t.  He left it in Goodneighbor, he said it needed maintenance.  He wasn’t a good liar and he wouldn’t admit the real reason when I asked.  I’d figured it would be stolen and hadn’t cared, but he took the fusion core and did something that would presumably keep it from opening normally.  It seemed almost stupid to leave it behind, but we had a deathclaw and if this guy decided to act like the rest of the Enclave and tried to kill me, I appreciated that he’d made it easier to stop him.  

We stayed at Greentop Nursery for the night.  I’d heard that after the Survivor fixed it up, the place became one of the bigger farms.  It had a line of trade with the Slog and they’d sell most of their crops out there.  The Slog might be a little more fortified, the last I’d heard, but those ghouls gave me the creeps and it was further from Med-Tek anyway.  I didn’t mention it as an option.  I’d gotten this far and we were doing this my way.  

When we got there, we found Greentop annihilated.  Body parts littered the ground and there was blood everywhere.  

“Those are knife wounds,” Arcade remarked, looking at the nearest corpse.  “Whoever did this… they were using a blade.”  

“ _Of_ _course_ they were,” I groaned.  Abraham was well known for that creepy machete he carried.  I really did not want to run into the Survivor while we were out here.  

Arcade frowned.  “Is there something I should know?”  He was looking around but seemed calmer than he should be.  

I raised an eyebrow.  He really hadn’t heard, had he?  Jeez, where was this guy from?

“There’s a guy, he’s been going around killing people lately.  Uses a machete?  Killed one of Coyote’s kids?”

That cleared things up.  A split second after the realization washed over him, he frowned again and asked, “He uses a machete?”

“What?”  I made sure the blood was all dry and checked on the broken turrets.  I’d salvage what I could, hopefully the turret parts would be worth a few caps, and then I’d clean off the cots.  Staying here for the night would probably be our best option.  The lights and generator were still running, so hopefully even if Abe saw the light, he wouldn’t think anyone was here.  “So does Coyote, and so does that other guy with him.”

“`That guy’ being Vulpes Inculta?”

“That’s his last name?”  I shook my head and muttered, “What the fuck?”  Raising my voice to be heard, I confirmed, “Yeah, him.”

Arcade mulled it over.  “You’re right, it’s probably a coincidence.”  

This guy was just _weird_.  I took the surviving chips and wires out of the turrets, shoved them into my bag and frowned back at him.  “You know some machete cult I haven’t heard of?”

“You’ve heard of one?”

“No, I just meant…”  Oh, he’d been joking.  An awkward silence descended and Arcade clarified.  

“The Legion just uses a lot of machetes.  Seeing as two of them apparently made it out here, I just thought maybe this psycho…  Maybe it wasn’t a coincidence.”  Geiger cleared a patch of dirt by scraping his claws over the ground and stretched out, evidently quite comfortable with the carnage around us.  I guess I wasn’t really surprised.  We hadn’t had problems getting here because— surprise, surprise— nothing wanted to fuck with a deathclaw, so I hadn’t seen him fight, and that made those claws and teeth a little less terrifying.  His nonchalance about blood, however, reminded me what I was dealing with.  I don’t think I’d sleep easily tonight.  

Arcade waited by the cold ashes of the cooking fire and tried to change the subject while I picked what valuables I could find from the turrets and then the bodies.  Abe didn’t loot.  Crazy, right?  

Before I got to the bodies, he guessed, “Planning to build something with those later?”

I looked at him and considered who I was dealing with.  This guy could probably put something together that could kill me in seconds given the chips I’d picked up and what remained of the turrets.  Yet another reason to sleep with one eye open.  Coyote really had to be crazy.  

“No.”  I explained, and somewhat reluctantly admitted, “I never could wrap my mind around all that science crap.”

“So…it’s just valuable junk?”  He tried to sound like he was just making conversation, but it was pretty obvious that he was judging me for that.  Yes, I’m a hired gun who really cares about money, but he’s with the fucking Enclave!  

“Yeah.”  I did my best to sound adamant and not defensive.  

“Okay.”  He raised his hands in mock surrender and went to investigate the shack again.  He came back with iguana kebabs and purified water.  We hadn’t talked most of the way here and we didn’t talk while we ate.  On the way, we’d been listening for wildlife and any folks who might attack us, just in case Geiger didn’t deter everything.  Now that we weren’t moving, we’d relaxed, but only because we were less likely to be ambushed.  I for one would have been much calmer if we weren’t eating dinner in a farm filled with corpses.  

This tension was about as pleasant as the smell of rotting fish.  I looked around as I ate, never looking at Arcade directly, but never really letting him out of my sight, just in case.  I tried to come up with something to say and found a topic when I looked at Geiger.  The way Coyote had greeted this guy, he might not be leaving any time soon and as much as I didn’t trust him, I should probably try to strike up a conversation just so he might be less inclined to shoot me in the back.  

“Isn’t Geiger going to eat?”  Even if I hadn’t wanted to talk to him, I wasn’t too comfortable with the deathclaw going hungry when there were two convenient snacks nearby, one of which hadn’t been with him very long.  And Geiger lifted his head to look at me, hearing his name.  

Arcade shook his head.  “He ate a few days ago.”

I met the deathclaw’s gaze uncomfortably.  “Yeah… and you’re sure he only wants to eat every few days?”

Arcade watched Geiger and shrugged as the deathclaw lay back down and closed his eyes.  “Well, reptiles have a much slower metabolism, and that probably goes for deathclaws as well.  I’d guess that they only need to eat once a week.”

“Oh.”  I didn’t understand half of that explanation.  So much for getting on his good side.  

I gave up trying to chat and just kept an eye on the shadows beyond the farmstead.

*       *       *

This mercenary friend of Coyote’s certainly wasn’t very chatty.  I’d be alright with his silence if it weren’t for the fact that every time he looked at me, I felt like he was fighting the urge to shoot me.  The worst part was that I had no idea why.  He might not like how intelligent I was, in which case I’d have to resist the urge to actively antagonize him.  He might be intimidated because I showed up with power armor and a deathclaw.  He might be jealous.  For all I knew, the guy just didn’t like the way I looked.  

He hadn’t even told me why we needed to go here.  He’d mentioned Med-Tek, so I could presume that we were seeking medical supplies, but we could be doing anything from supplying that town with the fixer most of the residents desperately needed to looting whatever we could find to sell.  His urgency was the only reason I hadn’t refused.  Coyote trusted this man, and however prickly his attitude, he had a look of desperation that made me want to help him.  His opinion of myself only reinforced the idea that this was urgent, which made me think that whatever we were looking for, it was needed to save someone’s life.  I just wish he trusted me enough to explain that.  

I did wonder what Zion had going on with him.  I’d barely said two words to my friend before Zion ushered me off to help MacCready while he spoke to Vulpes and watched his kids.  Inculta was never an easy man to read, but for the brief time that I’d seen him, he had looked so shaken that I barely needed to be told that he’d just arrived.  He’d known nothing of the pregnancy, he seemed disturbed by Zion’s gender, and I got the sense that he had cared for Zion much more than Zion had cared for him.  As the father of Zion’s kids, I understood that Vulpes had first dibs on an explanation.  With the often volatile frumentari, and with his trio of young children, I accepted that Zion didn’t have much time to spare for me right now.  Or MacCready, for that matter, or else MacCready didn’t have time to waste.  The way he looked at Zion, there was something between them.  At the very least, there was attraction, and I suspected more, but at least since I’d arrived, Zion had barely given him a passing glance.  I wondered if this was a one-sided attraction as well, but I knew too little about the situation to make that judgement.  

Zion’s appearance had changed a lot more than I’d expected.  After Preston had mentioned a surgery, I’d figured that he’d made himself more masculine, but the way he looked suggested genetic alterations or perhaps some form of implant to alter his hormones.  He was _completely_ male.  Even coming out here to find him, I’d always focused more on his mind and his actions, his old-world beliefs, his intellect, and the way he would quietly observe things.  I’d thought about his body, but never sexually.  I cared about him, I wasn’t sure how deeply, but I tried not to think of his female body.  When he passed, I could forget what he was like physically.  I had found him attractive when I didn’t dwell on what he looked like beneath his clothes, but I had really been a bit unsettled by the idea of having a relationship with him beyond romance.  I didn’t know to what extent his body had been altered, but I liked the changes I could see.  

I didn’t normally go for beards, but Zion’s combination of goatee and wild hair suited him perfectly.  On my journey out here I’d imagined the spindly man I’d known, but he’d bulked up, either from managing his children or from eating more regularly.  He epitomized the Legion, physically speaking, but this was still Zion, and he was less Legion than ever in his mentality, according to Preston.  Sharply defined muscles broadened his tall frame and made his limbs look a bit less stretched.  And dark suits still flattered his figure.  

MacCready broke the silence.  I guess we both had Zion on our minds, because he asked with obvious discomfort, “Hey… you knew Coyote before, right?” 

“Yeah?”

“Do you know…”  He hesitated.  After a moment, he awkwardly blurted out, “Do you know how exactly Coyote had kids with that guy?”

He could not possibly be this stupid.  “I presume that happened in the usual way.”

MacCready got defensive.  “Look, I’m not an idiot!  I know how these things usually happen, I _have_ a kid, but…  They’re both _guys_ …”

I frowned at him.  “Uh… not exactly.”

MacCready raised an eyebrow and made a face.  “What does _that_ mean?”  He realized what it meant and after a few seconds, he nodded.  “Yeah, that makes sense, now that I think about it.  His voice really is _very_ high…”

I shook my head.  “Uh, no, not Vulpes.  Vulpes is a man.  Most definitely a _man._ ”  I swallowed uncomfortably as my mind went from picturing Vulpes in that disturbingly flattering suit he’d worn on the Strip to picturing Zion in the same suit and finding myself even more distracted.  “ _Coyote_ used to be a woman.  Sort of.  He was always a man, in terms of his mind, but his body was female.”

MacCready made a face.  “You sure about that?  I mean, science can do a lot of crazy sh— crazy stuff, but I’m pretty sure that Coyote is and always has been a _guy_.”  

Now I felt even more uncomfortable.  “You, um…  How do you know that?”  I was pretty sure I knew the answer, but I opted to be blunt partly to make sure and partly because I didn’t have a high opinion of this guy’s intelligence.  

MacCready scowled.  “How do you think?”  I guess he wanted to make sure we understood each other because, for a moment, clearity won out over privacy and he stated, “I’ve seen the guy naked, okay?  We’ve…  I’ve—”  He lost his nerve and stated clearly enough.  “I know he’s a guy, alright?  I know him to the point that that isn’t something he could lie about.”

I tried not to dwell on that knowledge as much as I tried not to dwell on Zion’s relationship to Vulpes.  I felt it was safe to assume that whatever Abraham had done, he’d transformed Coyote to the point that the man’s body matched his mind more completely than I’d thought possible.  He must have noticed Zion’s healing abilities and found some way around them.  I wondered how.  

Awkward silence fell.  Trying to shrug it off, MacCready avoided my gaze and insisted, “You’re _sure_ he used to be a woman?”  He seemed less shaken than I’d expected.  From what he’d said, I figured this had to be because he didn’t really care either way, or maybe he even preferred women.  

“Yeah,” I answered as flatly as I could, “I kind of examined him when he was pregnant.”

MacCready stared at me and I clarified.  “I’m a doctor.”

“Oh.”  He frowned like he was thinking that over and I figured it was because we were on our way to get medicine for someone, so presumably somebody he knew was sick.  His next question just left me confused.  “Are you from Nevada?”

I shrugged.  “Well, California, originally, but I lived in Nevada for a while.”  

“And you came all the way out here to find Coyote?”

“Yes.”  That held some meaning for him that I wasn’t getting.  He looked at me like his whole perspective had changed and I tilted my head.  “What?”

“You’re… dedicated.”

I chuckled.  “That’s a polite way of saying `desperate.’”

He laughed more dryly.  “You don’t seem desperate.”

The way he said that, I got the sense that he did love, or at least deeply care about Coyote, and he knew that I felt the same.  He sounded almost resigned, so I figured that we both knew which of us Coyote seemed to prefer.  I wouldn’t be surprised if MacCready had expected Zion to come here with him rather than sending me.  

“Look,” I leveled with him, “I don’t really know _why_ I came out here, mostly I just didn’t have anyone else and, well, I… I needed something to keep me going.  But I care about Coyote.  A lot.  I understand that you two are close, but if he decides he’d rather be with me—”

“Right.”  

“I didn’t plan to break up any relationship—”

“Then what the hell _did_ you plan?”  He stood up, waking Geiger with his sudden movement.  I think he wanted to flee this conversation, but he wasn’t going to, so he just paced, every step radiating frustration.  I felt sorry for him, but relationships were a cooperative venture.  If Coyote decided to break it off because I’d somehow managed to find him again, I wasn’t going to stop him.  I didn’t like what he seemed to keep doing to guys, and there would certainly be a lot of long, careful conversations if he did want to start something with me, but there might easily have been extenuating circumstances.  In the Legion, Vulpes had been his only friend and probably the only person who knew his real gender; staying on his good side would have been a necessity, even to the point of faking a romantic relationship.  MacCready was more of a grey area.  It was possible that the mercenary just imagined a romance where none existed, or that Coyote had pursued him honestly, but only because he never expected to see me again.  I hadn’t thought this through.  I didn’t know which truth I preferred, I just knew I was heading into a ghoul-infested laboratory with a man who had basically had his life ruined thanks to me.  Granted, it was inadvertent, and theoretically, I didn’t have to rekindle my connection with Coyote, but now that I knew he was alive, now that I’d seen the way those dazzling blue eyes looked at me after all this time, I don’t think I could possibly refuse him.  

MacCready ran a hand through his hair before settling his hat back onto his head at a crooked angle.  He rounded on me.  “What right do you have to come all the way out here and uproot his life after all these years?  You don’t have _any_ right!  Right?  Why?  Just— _why_?!”

I didn’t have an answer for him.  At least, not any answer that would help.  The truth was, I’d thought about Zion more often than I wanted to admit.  For a long time I’d convinced myself that it just wasn’t possible to find him again, or that he was dead somewhere in the wasteland, and that had kept me from seeking him out.  If I had still had any semblance of a life back out west, I would never have come here.  If he hadn’t been on my mind for so long, I might have thought that I only came looking for him to convince myself that I wasn’t just running away, the way I’d been fleeing for most of my life.  I think I had almost tried to believe that before I’d seen him again in Goodneighbor.  Now I knew for certain that for once I had actually gone looking for something and by some miracle I had found it.  

I just sat in silence and let MacCready rant.  I half expected him to punch me and was glad when he didn’t try, instead he seemed to cough and rubbed his eyes with the back of his sleeve.  He was crying.  I hadn’t been able to tell in the dim light.  “I guess I shouldn’t be surprised,” he muttered to himself and then tried to mask his pain with anger.  “Why did you even come find him after all this time?!  Why didn’t you just stay out of his life!  You already left him once!”

As much as I tried to be understanding, I answered him pretty harshly.  “I _didn’t_ `leave him,’ he fled the Mojave!”

“Then why the hell didn’t you go with him _then_?”

I could feel myself getting very angry and forced myself to calm down before I answered him.  “He left fleeing a war.  He deserted an army he disagreed with, but he couldn’t fight because he was pregnant at the time.  I _also_ disagreed with that army.  I stayed to _help_ … someone I thought I knew to win the war.”

“And that’s so important?” MacCready snapped, “Wars happen.  It never makes any difference.  It’s not like you were even staying there anyway.”

*       *       *

Arcade stared at me like I’d just slapped him in the face.  “`It never makes any difference’?  Seriously?!”  He stood up and started pacing.  “The army Coyote was a part of _enslaved_ people.  _Thousands_ of people.  We stopped them.  We ousted them from the Mojave, and their entire nation dissolved a few years later.  You can’t tell me that didn’t make a difference.”

“And let me guess, whoever took over is absolutely perfect, and does everything right, and everyone lives fucking happily ever after, is that right?”  I expected— and wanted— some kind of retort, hell, if he hauled off and punched me, that would be great, I’d deserve it.  For a moment, he looked like he was going to, but instead he just sighed and let his shoulders droop.  

“No.  Maybe you’re right.  I don’t know.  I just… I couldn’t let the Legion win.  Anything has to be better than that.”  He paced a little longer and looked around at how dark it had become.  “We should get some sleep.”  Arcade walked into the shack and lay down on one of the cots.  He closed his eyes but I was pretty sure he was still awake and thinking.  I didn’t want any more conversation tonight.  Not tomorrow, either, aside from “Look out, ghoul on your left!”  I felt like I’d somehow shattered his core beliefs.  Good riddance.  The way he talked, he had to be a soldier.  No one else felt that certain that their side was right.  If he’d helped the Enclave take over some city out west, whatever army Coyote had been a part of, slavers or no, probably should have won.  I guess the Brotherhood looked okay compared to some of the other people in the wasteland.  

*       *       *

I woke to a distant bellow.  I hadn’t gotten much sleep.  Half the night, I’d been wondering if the Mojave really would have been better off under Legion rule.  It wouldn’t have, of course, but the NCR wasn’t great either.  I never saw House, I don’t even know exactly why Wolf had killed him.  It probably had something to do with his job carrying the Platinum Chip, but he never told me his reasons.  I couldn’t shake the feeling that there must have been some alternative to the NCR, but I couldn’t think of any, and after all these years, the point was moot.  

MacCready woke up a few seconds after I did, when a second bellow echoed across the lake and Geiger answered.  The mercenary jolted awake, tangled in blankets, flailed to get free and fell out of the cot in the process.  I hadn’t realized how similar both roars had sounded until I heard them back to back and my blood ran cold.  “Where did you say this facility was?  We should get going.”

MacCready scowled like he was going to protest and then thought better of it as another roar rang out over the lake, this one nearer than the last, and Geiger stood up, listening eagerly.  Geiger roared back while MacCready and I gathered our things to leave.  “Geiger, is that really the best idea?”

The deathclaw did understand some basic logic, but apparently the idea that he might be attracting danger was beyond him in this instance.  He tilted his horns at me and whistled in confusion.  I sighed.  “Never mind.”  

MacCready slung his pack over his shoulder and looked north, where we could just barely see a dark shape lumbering towards us in the distance.  “This way.”  Considering the deathclaw steadily gaining, we set off at a jog, rifles drawn, and Geiger trailing along behind us looking back every few steps.  The mercenary ran ahead when we reached Med-Tek.  Geiger’s claws cleaved through three ghouls and the rest scattered before either MacCready or I had a chance to shoot.  MacCready ran for the door, either because he judged that it was safer inside or because he had already looked back.  I glanced over my shoulder.  A deathclaw charged towards us, nearly as large as Geiger but normal-colored and with horns that curved out to the sides.  Geiger had already turned from the ghouls and stepped towards it, stretching one set of glowing green claws out in front of me and bellowing at the newcomer, who returned the roar with gusto.  Expecting a fight, I backed towards the doorway but didn’t go in.  

I wouldn’t have made it out here without Geiger’s help, and granted, he wasn’t human, but I didn’t expect MacCready to rush ahead without me, he was probably waiting by the door inside and should be safe there.  The two deathclaws stared each other down for a moment before the local turned its head slightly.  It was very difficult to determine exactly where a deathclaw was looking, with the thick membranes that protected their eyes and hid their pupils, but I felt that hungry gaze and knew exactly why it had shifted its attention from Geiger.  Geiger stepped in front of me and I found a thickly-scaled white tail pressing me against the door.  Geiger turned his head as best as he could, scraping one massive horn against the wall of the building.  He nodded towards the door.  I didn’t need to be told twice.  “Good luck, buddy.”  

I ducked inside, glimpsing the local deathclaw slinking around the front of the building as the two started to circle each other.  I hoped that, when we retrieved whatever we were looking for, we wouldn’t emerge to find Geiger dead.  

I nearly ran into MacCready when I stepped inside.  

“Jeez!” he exclaimed, “I really thought it got you for a second.”

“Geiger’s handling it.”

He raised an eyebrow.  “You really think Geiger can handle that one?  Did you see the size of it?!”

“I _hope_ he can…”  Shaking off the darker thoughts, we went inside.  

The first part of the lab was pretty easy.  Between the two of us, we had no problem shooting the ghouls before they got close to us.  That was mostly because my gauss rifle destroyed several ghouls at a time, and often the walls and railings around them.  I could see why MacCready had had such trouble his first time here: the ghouls had a lot of opportunity to sneak up on you if you didn’t have someone watching your back, and a sniper rifle didn’t shoot or reload quickly enough to take down a group in close-quarters.  We shut down the security lockdown and took the elevator to the lab.  That’s when things really became a problem.  After seeing what damage the gauss rifle could do, MacCready insisted that I took point, so I was in front of him when we stepped onto the elevated walkway that encircled this room.  After fighting nothing but ghouls thus-far, we scanned the floor, looking around every corner, and listened for the tell-tale shuffle and groan.  Instead, inching along that walkway with our eyes down, I heard a terrifyingly familiar sharp beep.  “Turret!”

Behind me and not near any door, MacCready dove through a broken window, slid across a glass-covered table, sending the shards flying to shatter against the walls, and took cover.  In the same instant, I pressed back against the door behind me, felt an answering, hungry bump on the other side, and shot blindly in the direction the turret seemed to be.  My first shot missed, but luckily the turret sprayed its first hail of bullets along the wall where MacCready had been standing less than a second before.  My second shot didn’t miss.  

Pounding continued against my back, matching the pounding of my heart, while I caught my breath.  The ceilings.  We couldn’t forget to check the ceilings.  I hated dealing with turrets.  I stepped away from the door to check on MacCready, who stood in the dark room, picking glass out of his left hand.  He tied a bandage over it rather than use a stimpak.  “Let’s go.”

MacCready tried the door and found it locked, so he climbed back over the table and out the window while I watched the room.  Aside from the pounding on the door beside me, the lab was silent again.  Once he was out, we headed downstairs.  Or tried to.  The stairs to the rest of the lab were blocked.  Clearing them would take weeks.  MacCready stopped when he saw them.  He stared for a long moment and then remarked, “There _has_ to be another way down there.”

He went to look around, but I had already started.  “I think there is, but you’re not going to like it.”  

I stood in front of a locked door with no handle.  I could hear ghouls on the other side, pounding on the steel.  They must have heard the turret.  They would shuffle around and I think I could even hear them walking up and down inside the room, but every so often, there was a definite thud as one fell.  Probably between five and ten feet.  The floor must have collapsed.  

MacCready walked over and after a few seconds of listening, he realized the same thing.  “ _Wonderful_.  How do we get in there?”

I shared his lack of enthusiasm and sighed.  “There’s probably a release on that terminal upstairs.  But the way that these doors look, I can’t guarantee that I’ll be able to open only this one.”  

Unlocking the terminal took ten minutes on its own.  After that, I poked through the files.  Surprisingly, the turrets were easier to shut down, so I did that before messing with the doors.  The doors had a mass-unlock command to allow them all to open and close easily, the normal locking command, the locking command that was still active now as a result of the lockdown we had overridden, and an emergency unlock that seemed to be linked to the fire alarm system and the sensors that warned if the reactor went critical.  I investigated the mass-unlock command to see if there was any way to activate that on only one door, but that didn’t seem to be the case.  Actually, it sounded like any change in the setting for any door might deactivate the lockdown and the doors would all open automatically.  Maybe I could get around that by tricking the system into thinking there was a fire only in that room.  That seemed like the best chance to keep the rest of the doors locked.  

I glanced at MacCready while I input the command.  “Okay.  This looks like—”  All the doors sprang open.  “—Shit.”

MacCready backed up fast and I followed suit, both of us shooting as carefully as we could while at least twenty ghouls swarmed towards us.  The gauss rifle jammed.  We had ferals on both sides and a door to a storage room behind us.  We dove into the storage room and we weren’t alone.  

*       *       *

In the two days since Arcade and MacCready had left, I had explained everything to Vulpes and he’d adapted surprisingly well.  He’d warmed to his kids, and got along with them surprisingly better than I’d expected.  He’d become even more quiet than he used to be, and his discomfort with my gender manifested in even more silence and distant stares than usual, but I understood that he was dealing with that shock in his own way.  He told me he’d met Arcade after the dam.  He said vaguely that things had happened, but I should ask the doctor about them.  In his usual way, that could mean almost anything, but I suspected one or both of them had been injured, considering neither was dead.  I wondered what happened with Wolf, but didn’t ask about that.  Vulpes told me the Legion had dissolved, crumbling after Caesar’s death and the Legate’s defeat.  I found, to my surprise, that I no longer cared.  

My children had all adjusted very well to Vulpes.  I told them who he was and Jay and Israel had cautiously accepted him.  I’d expected Fox to do the same, but he’d been overjoyed, proclaiming, “I’m the luckiest kid _ever_!  I have _two_ daddies!”  I still don’t know if that showed some minor failing in my parenting or if the boy just didn’t realize it wasn’t normal to only have one parent.  Come to think of it, he had yet to meet any other families, the only other parent he knew was MacCready, who had never mentioned his wife to the kids.  

Fox and I were playing checkers, very fast-paced checkers, because he didn’t want to have to play inside, but it was pouring rain, and I’d used that excuse to confine everyone to the kitchen.  Jay held a pencil eagerly while Vulpes taught her Latin.  I’d been teaching her myself, but hadn’t gotten very far as Israel caught on much faster.  Right now, Israel stared out the window with his binoculars, as if he could see Med-Tek from here.  “I hope they’re alright.”  

Fox looked at him like he was an idiot.  The kid had gotten the best and the worst of his father in a lot of ways.  “He has power armor,” Fox pointed out, “and a deathclaw; they’re gonna be perfectly fine!”  Vulpes and I exchanged a glance.  I’d told the kids what I’d expected at the time, but we’d both seen the suit still in Goodneighbor when we’d gone out (he’d needed some time to think and I’d gone hunting.)  Arcade must have locked it somehow, but neither of us understood why he’d left it behind in the first place.  We hadn’t told the kids.  

Apparently, we hadn’t needed to.  Israel glared at Fox.  “They why’s daddy worried?”

Vulpes’s eyes flicked back towards me with slightly more concern, while Jay looked up from her paper to watch her brothers.  Fox scoffed, “Daddy worries about everything, that’s because he’s smart.”  

That statement distracted Vulpes from my fear and he turned to his son.  The sheer praise in his eyes comforted me a little.  “Exactly,” Vulpes assured Fox, “your father is the perfect balance of caution and audacity.  Both your fathers are.”

I chuckled.  “Audacity is right.”  I had said that very quietly, but spoke louder when I saw Israel’s eyes tearing up as he looked away.  I picked him up and set him on my lap.  Behind his brother, Fox rolled his eyes and I narrowed mine at him.  He went back to contemplating his move in checkers.  “They’ll be fine,” I reassured Israel as much as myself.  “Arcade made it across the country on his own.  He’s tougher than he looks.”

*       *       *

“Between the smell and the ferals, this laboratory is probably the worst place I have ever been.”  

I chuckled half-heartedly.  “Well, it’s a tough call, but the same probably goes for me.  It certainly makes Freeside look like a palace.”  MacCready frowned a little, but didn’t ask.  The ghouls had taken a good chunk out of his leg and they’d knocked a shelf down on top of me, but six stimpaks later, we were doing decently well.  He’d backed another shelf against the door and managed to shut the remainder of the horde outside while I’d been pinned.  Between the two of us, we’d killed the ghouls stuck here with us and then I’d healed him.  Over the past three hours, we’d recovered and I’d fished the lost bullet out of the gauss rifle so it could fire again.  I’d even tested it on a dead ghoul in the opposite corner.  Our chatting had been just to ease the tension, we both knew it was time to get out of here.  Our eyes locked.  He nodded at the door.  I nodded in affirmation.  

“Three.”

“Two.”

“One!”

MacCready hauled the shelf aside, having eventually been convinced by my argument against the usefulness of sniper rifles in this situation.  My first shot blasted six ghouls backwards off the walkway, two of them already torn to pieces by the concussion.  Three ghouls that had started to wander away rushed back and through the door before I could shoot again.  MacCready took one out with a headshot.  The other two dove at us, one at me, one at him.  We settled things with the butts of our rifles before aiming at the door.  Neither of us moved.  For several long moments, we waited, perfectly still, and we heard nothing.  We looked at each other and broke into tense smiles.  

“You know,” MacCready panted, “You’re not that bad at this.”

“Thanks.”  I started out the door and he followed, “You aren’t so bad yourself.”

We made our way downstairs and found the sealed section that contained the medical formulas.  For a long time, I’d been watching MacCready almost as closely as I’d been looking for ghouls, and I got the sense that he’d been doing the same.  Nearly getting eaten alive had changed that.  We weren’t friends, my arrival destroyed his relationship with Coyote and what he’d said last night had shaken me more than I liked to admit, but we’d formed a tentative alliance.  We’d been careful before, but independently.  Right now, both of us understood that we needed a plan.  I set the computer up to unlock the door as soon as he pressed enter, and I lined up my first shot before he did so.  One keystroke and the door flew open.  My rifle disintegrated the glowing feral and knocked one of the others backwards with the force of the blast.  MacCready shot the third feral and we killed the one I’d stunned a split second after that.  

Five minutes of searching the lab and I found the inoculation we’d come here to get.  I handed it to MacCready.  His jaw dropped.  “We did it!  Holy crap, we actually did it!  We just gave Duncan a fighting chance to live.”  I was right, he was trying to save someone.  His excitement shifted rapidly to something like remorse.  “Look, I know I’ve been… kinda harsh on you.  I… I guess you’re really an okay guy.  Sorry.”

“It’s okay, I can’t say I’ve been the friendliest either.”  He started towards the door but stopped to look back when I walked to a desk and rifled through the papers I could find.  

“What are you looking for?”  He wanted to get the cure somewhere as quickly as possible; I could hear the impatience in his voice, but he was trying to be understanding because he realized that he couldn’t have gotten it without my help. 

I took the second folder I looked through and stowed it in my bag.  The ghouls had knocked paper everywhere, but things were still surprisingly clean and organized.  I could easily read all the information.  “The research and formula relating to Prevent.  Just in case.”  I suppose, at the time, I just didn’t want the information to be lost, but in hindsight it was lucky that I picked it up.  

“Oh.” MacCready remarked, “Yeah, that’s probably a good idea.  You got everything?”

“Everything I could find that seems relevant.”

“Good.  Let’s get this back to Goodneighbor.”

I assumed that whoever Duncan was, he lived in Goodneighbor as well.  Thinking about it, MacCready had mentioned that he had a kid.  In present tense.  Considering all three of Coyote’s kids resembled their fathers too much to belong to anyone else, MacCready’s kid had to live somewhere else for some reason.  Possibly to prevent the spread of disease?  I suppressed a shudder as I thought it over.  If MacCready’s kid was sick…  From what I’d read of the research, this disease was _bad_.  It sounded like a disease I’d heard of a long time ago, but that was a prewar disease that may have been engineered and had probably mutated regardless.  The “cure” wasn’t a guarantee, and if this was a new case of that same disease, at the very least it had cropped up again, which would cause problems considering how few doctors there were and how difficult it would be to manufacture or even research a cure or vaccine.  If this wasn’t an isolated case, or if the infection spread to _anyone_ it would spread fast, and the symptoms meant it would be very lethal.  Whether or not this cure worked, we could be on the verge of a pandemic.  

I forced that thought to the back of my mind as I followed MacCready upstairs.  The building was silent, both inside and out.  Distracted as I was, I opened the door to the parking lot.  Black horns and gleaming yellow eyes greeted me, a pink, toothy muzzle less than a meter from my face. 


	20. Bad News

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Your father is not available at the moment, may I take a message?"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Another pretty graphic fight happens. And the aftermath is occasionally graphic. >_>' Sorry, it seems to be happening a lot in this fic.  
> Also, this is another REALLY long chapter. But there might only be a few more, at this point.  
> As much as I enjoy writing this, and there are aspects I really like, I feel like it just isn't my best work for a lot of reasons and between that feeling, some frustration with my intentional lack of sexual content in this fic, and the feeling that I've worked out so much of what happens from this point on that I just have to put it to words, I'm mostly forcing myself to get this finished so I can move on to my next, decidedly more sexual, idea.

Finding a deathclaw so close to us, MacCready and I both scrambled backwards, leveling our rifles as the creature snarled and shoved its face into the doorway, bowing the metal inward and jamming the door open by crushing the doorframe.  A second growl halted the deathclaw blocking our way out.  Geiger nosed this deathclaw on the neck and nudged her back, out of the doorway.  The female rumbled in confusion and flexed her claws.  Geiger answered with a sharp growl.  He stepped between us and her, shielding the door enough that I felt safe to step outside behind him.  MacCready trailed after me, more reluctant, but evidently more confident than I was that I knew what I was doing around deathclaws.  Seeing us, the female whined hungrily and Geiger replied with a warning growl.  He still had a scar on the leg I had mended when he’d been a hatchling, and he waved that foot pointedly towards the female.  She stared blankly.  I didn’t pretend to really understand them, but I could follow this exchange easily enough.  Geiger was only as smart as a child, by my best judgement, but this female, although probably a fairly intelligent deathclaw as well, couldn’t grasp his meaning.  

MacCready tugged my arm and nodded south.  Geiger glanced back at us and I gestured the way we were headed, hoping he’d understand before the female shifted her attention away from him.  Geiger nodded and turned back to his friend while we headed south at a very brisk walk, hoping our haste wouldn’t drive the female to chase us down.  I heard Geiger still struggling to converse with her until we got out of earshot.  He’d be able to find us easily enough, considering his sense of smell.  If they hadn’t killed each other yet, he should be fine.  

*       *       *

In four days, the locals had gotten used to Vulpes.  He still radiated his usual aura of menace, and nobody was willing to mess with him, but the guards got just a little more relaxed around him and the people who knew and liked me, when they were feeling especially bold, would greet him if he walked by.  Fox was overjoyed to have both his biological parents around and even Jay warmed to Vulpes much more quickly than I had expected.  She’d been so afraid since Sanctuary, and I can’t say I was surprised.  It had taken a while for me to ease off of my paranoia after that as well.  

Vulpes and I took turns watching my kids, spending more time teaching them now as the city had become slightly more dangerous.  The Brotherhood was becoming more active now that they realized the Institute was dead.  The Minutemen were no serious threat to them, so they focused on “cleansing” the Commonwealth.  We barely had an hour between the whir of vertibirds and Israel took to scanning the skies whenever possible.  I don’t know if the Brotherhood had any way of detecting what we were, and I didn’t plan to find out.  Given their stance on ghouls, synths, and super mutants, I didn’t expect they would treat skinwalkers as anything short of monsters.  If they found us, they would try to kill my family.  I wasn’t going to tempt that fate.  

As it happened, Vulpes had collected more caps than I had ever seen, partly through finding them on their own and partly through gathering and trading any valuable items he found on his way here.  He’d found quite a lot of them.  As he told me, the journey nearly killed him more than once, and the money did not help when he had the best equipment he could find and refused to hire mercenaries.  I wasn’t surprised; this was Vulpes, he collected the money in case he would need it, but he was reaching me alone.  It did have a convenient side-effect.  After Vulpes arrived, I could buy anything we needed from the locals and the few traders passing through.  I only needed to hunt on occasion.  Hopefully, that meant danger wouldn’t find us.  

Right now, it was late, and the kids were all, supposedly, asleep in their room.  I’d built a bed for Fox from a bunch of old lobster traps and pajamas.  I’d always been pretty handy; I’d made all the beds in this house in similar fashion and most of the furniture as well.  Fox tolerated the smell because the carvings on the headboard and footboard made up for it.  I’d asked all the kids what they wanted when I had made their beds, and Fox was no different.  He’d had to share with Israel for two nights, but tonight he had asked to go to bed early just to sleep in it.  Carving was not my strong suit; I could craft furniture easily enough, but it was always more functional than decorative.  Fox had very stylized wolves, deathclaws, and, at his insistence, cacti.  Jay had swirls, cats, puppies, and butterflies.  Israel had ravens, eagles (as best as I could imagine them), and, to my horror, vertibirds.  The kid was a little obsessed with flight, which I could understand, but his interests worried me.  I had always felt terribly responsible for his legs, but it might be a blessing in disguise that he couldn’t wander off to spy on the Brotherhood’s flying machines.  

Vulpes had been sleeping on a mat in the downstairs hallway.  I hadn’t cleared most of the first floor and didn’t use it, so he pretty much had it to himself.  I’d offered to build him a bed, but he refused, insisting he was comfortable.  I wasn’t surprised.  Back in the Legion, elevated beds were a rare luxury.  Bedrolls were standard.  In truth, I suspected and Vulpes confirmed that he had rarely lived indoors for more than a few days at a time.  Being unable to see the sky or his surroundings set him on edge, but I could tell that he was slowly getting used to it just as he had begun to adjust to my gender.  He still kept his mat in front of the door, so he would be awakened if anyone entered the house.  As cautious as I could be, I had locked the windows, and downstairs had no openings except the door.  Short of landing on the roof, this house had only one entrance.  

As we had been doing the previous days, after all the kids fell asleep, we trusted that they would stay asleep and cooked our dinner.  The kids ate first, before bed, but we didn’t eat dinner with them because, to save time, they ate while being taught.  Besides, our private dinner after they were asleep gave us a chance to talk.  We’d shared most of what had happened since we’d parted ways, and we’d discussed a great deal of other things, mostly the kids, but he had yet to ask why I’d never told him the truth about myself.  I didn’t think he ever would, he probably considered it a painful topic and expected me to avoid giving an answer if he brought it up.  I wanted to tell him.  

“It bothers me so much that I knew you but you never really knew me.”

The statement broke the silence in which we’d been eating and he froze mid-bite to contemplate it.  I wasn’t surprised that he didn’t say anything, of course he was just going to wait until he sorted out a proper response.  I gave him a few seconds to understand what I meant, but continued before he could answer.  

“I _did_ trust you with my life, I hope you know that.  But I know you are a man with strong beliefs and I know that in some ways you can be very orthodox.  When we served the Legion together, I couldn’t risk the possibility that you might react poorly.  We relied on each other for survival as well as companionship, and I cared about you.  I still do.  If you reacted harshly, I expected that it would at least end our friendship if not our lives.”  

The barest trace of a crease appeared between his eyebrows as he thought that over.  I knew him well enough to recognize that he was annoyed, but understood my reasons.  At length, he accepted, “I suppose that was a fair concern.”

I sat back in my chair, relaxing again as I sipped my glass of water.  “I’m glad you understand.  I know this has been a lot to get used to all at once, but you certainly seem unsettled by… me.  I can’t imagine you would have been more tolerant back then.”  

His frown became a bit more pronounced, this time offended rather than frustrated.  “You tell me that you are a skinwalker and not that you have a male brain?  I understand your caution, but I would have appreciated if you’d been honest with me.”  He fell silent to have a drink as well, and I got the sense that he finished his glass specifically to have the time to consider his next statement.  “You are right, I do find your masculinity …disturbing.  I admit that had you told me at the time, I would have been less… open to such a concept.”  

I laughed uncomfortably.  “I guess it was more jarring than I realized for you to find out all at once when you arrived.  Not only was I male, mentally speaking, but I’d surgically changed my sex and had children.  Your children.”  

“I was unaware of the children and the surgery,” he calmly explained, “but I had been told of your gender.”  

I frowned at him and cocked my head.  “You were told?  By who?”  Only a handful of people knew that I had a female body and presented as male.  Most people who knew the former truth weren’t likely to run into him and have both of them survive.  Though he was, admittedly, very hard to kill himself.  

“Dr. Gannon.”

I tilted my head the other way.  “You ran into Arcade between the loss of the dam and when you made it out here?”

He nodded.  “Yes.  The good doctor probably saved my life.”  He hesitated and explained.  “I was… injured and sought shelter in that bunker in the mountains.  The one where we…”

He trailed off and I cleared my throat.  “Yes, er, _that_ bunker.”

“Yes.”  He continued hastily, “He was staying there.  I suspect he has some connection to the place, but he may have simply gained access in some other way.  He saved my life and we discussed you.”

“Oh?”

I hoped for more detail, but of course he didn’t provide that.  Instead, he got very serious, “Are you aware that a substance exists which can halt our healing?”

“Yes.”  I sighed.  “Silver?”

He nodded.  “You never bothered to warn of that fact.”

I shrugged.  “Silver’s rare.  In truth, I thought the idea that we could be killed by silver was nothing but a myth, like so many other things.  I’ve never seen real silver and I never cared to seek it out.  You were injured by silver?”

“Yes.  The reason is irrelevant now; the problem has been solved.  Though I would recommend avoiding any silver in the future.”  He got up to refill his drink.  

I sipped my water, contemplating that idea.  Was it possible that Abraham had somehow used silver to neutralize my healing temporarily?  No, that was unlikely, he must have figured out some other means.  But it _was_ possible that he may have used those same means to create a poison or otherwise alter his machete so that it could wound us.  Fox had lived, and he had stabbed Fox with _my_ blade, not his own, so Raven’s death…  Abraham must have somehow used what he learned in performing that surgery to find a way to kill skinwalkers.  And maybe even to infect himself with our condition.  No ordinary man could become that impervious.  

A soft, almost panicked voice piped up from the other room.  “Daddy?”

Vulpes and I were instantly on edge.  Yes, my children had nightmares.  Even Fox called out at least once a week and Jay was often in tears with fright whenever she woke up; we expected harmless dreams or childhood fears, but the violence of the wasteland and our military pasts had us both prepared for combat.  

I was in the room first.  Israel sat up in his bed beside the window, holding his binoculars but looking at us.  Fox was rubbing the sleep from his eyes and scowling at his brother.  Jay was still curled up under her blanket, fast asleep, and so completely covered that I barely saw her.  Vulpes stepped into the room behind me as I asked, “What is it?”

Israel nodded outside, ruffling his wild red hair with the motion.  “There’s people outside in ugly power armor.  In Goodneighbor.”  

Vulpes and I exchanged a frown.  “Brotherhood?” he theorized.  

“Probably.”  I walked over to Israel and looked out his window.  Yes.  Brotherhood soldiers.  At least one paladin, from what I could see.  I patted my son on the back.  “You should be asleep, but good job.”  I gave him a quick hug and walked back into the kitchen.  Vulpes followed me and we lowered our voices so the kids wouldn’t hear.  

“Watch our children.”  He quirked an eyebrow, presumably feeling that I should stay and he should investigate, so I explained my reasoning, “I know the neighborhood and I know the mayor.  Most people here seem to like me.  As much as everyone’s out for themselves, if the Brotherhood attacks me, more than a few folks will join me against them.  And they don’t know how difficult it is to kill our kind.”  

“You assume they’ll use melee weapons,” Vulpes pointed out, “A laser may well be as deadly against us as against anything else.  And you are armed with a machete against power armored foes.”

Rummaging in the cabinet above the fridge, I retrieved and held up six pulse grenades.  “Power armor isn’t always an asset.”  I grinned and headed downstairs.  “This shouldn’t take long, I don’t plan to start a fight unless I have to.  I just want to know why they’re here.”

~       ~       ~

I found the Brotherhood down in the street, circled around Arcade’s power armor.  There were four of them, one a scribe.  Two and the scribe studied the power armor, trying to open it while the third, a paladin, asked anyone who would listen what they knew about the armor.  He was waving a laser rifle, but this was Goodneighbor, and to their credit no one would answer him.  

From what I knew of the Brotherhood, I could presume that they just didn’t want anyone else having power armor, which meant they either planned to steal it or kill whoever owned it.  With one hand wrapped around the pulse grenade in my pocket, I stopped the grimy teenager taking hits of jet beside me and asked him to warn KL-E-0.  I figured he’d do as he was told mostly because I used my most intimidating tone and he looked like he expected a knife between his ribs even before I spoke.  He ran around the corner and I gave him a few seconds.  The Brotherhood had yet to see me and I waited until the annoyed assaultron stepped out of her shop and walked over to me.  The Brotherhood watched her warily.  I saw their gazes drift to me, but they didn’t walk over yet, and KL-E-0 ignored them as she addressed me.  

“Planning to kill someone?  I offer plenty of supplies for the job… for the right price.”

“Already bought what I need,—” I remarked, keeping half an eye on the Brotherhood.  Seeing us talking, the paladin started towards us.  “—from you, actually.”  I hoped she remembered and I watched those eye-like lights as gears and circuits softly whirred inside her.  

“Ah…  So _that’s_ why you selected them.  Good luck.”  I smiled as she walked off.  I think she said good luck because she knew that weapons and power armor weren’t things I’d sell to Daisy.  If I took out this squad, their equipment would earn KL-E-0 a tidy profit.  

The paladin walked up to me, not noticing or caring that I had my hand in my pocket or that I wore a dog skin hood tonight.  

“What do you know about this suit of power armor?”  He was trying to sound polite, but his voice had such an air of disdain that I felt more comfortable than I expected with the idea that I might need to kill him.  

“I know it is not yours and that you should not be fiddling with it.”  Despite my words, and the plans I was forming, I spoke politely, more politely than he had spoken to me.  I tried to be diplomatic.  Maybe we could avoid a fight, though I didn’t expect that would be possible.  

I couldn’t see his face, but the paladin raised his rifle and pressed the muzzle against my chest.  “The owner of this armor is an enemy of the Brotherhood.  You wouldn’t want to be marked as an enemy of the Brotherhood yourself.”  He was trying to intimidate me.  I tightened my fingers around the grenade and tensed my arm.  

“The Brotherhood strong-arms farmers to give up their crops, sometimes to the point that they have trouble even surviving.  You massacre ghouls and synths with no regard for whether or not they deserve it.  You force your authority on the masses and operate under the childish illusion that everything is black or white, good or evil, and that exceptions to your bigoted rules simply do not exist.  I would _gladly_ call myself your enemy!”  

I believed every word I said, but I admit I may have gotten just a bit carried away in my attempt to intimidate the paladin.  He yelled some command to call his comrades to arms, but I threw the grenade before he had a chance.  All three soldiers found themselves unable to move or aim as their power armor jerked and contracted, breaking bones and bruising flesh.  The scribe, unhindered, aimed and shot, missing me and blasting a few bricks off the wall to my right.  I dove at him, doing my best to run, but really managing an odd jerky stride.  The erratic movements threw off his aim and he missed twice more before I reached him.  He brought up his laser rifle and I knocked it aside, ripping it out of his hand and plunging my machete up to the hilt in his throat.  I stabbed down and I heard the blade stop his heart.  It probably pierced it clean through.  The first pulse grenade wore off and three angry power-armored soldiers rushed towards me.  A laser seared my back, burning to the bone.  I couldn’t see the wound, but I stumbled, accidentally dodging a punch from the knight beside me.  I didn’t dodge the second punch.  He struck me in the jaw, a blow that would have killed any human.  I felt my skull shatter and knew it was visible as I fell to the ground.  The handful of locals who hadn’t fled watched in horrified silence and my watering eyes saw from their revulsion that my injury looked even worse than it felt.  The Brotherhood must have thought I was dead because they returned their attention to Arcade’s armor until the blood in my lungs and throat forced me to cough.  

“What the—?!!”

I rolled onto my stomach and spat onto the brick.  So much blood poured to the ground that I felt even dizzier.  Broken bits of bone dribbled out of my mouth but the teeth regrew as I stood.  I could hear more than feel the skull fragments and tissue shifting and mending in my head.  My vision swam with more than tears and reaching up, I wiped blood from my eyes.  Another laser raked across me and I snarled as my arm was sliced open.  Pain and anger probably had me less than human, but I couldn’t bring myself to care.  Conscious thought hardly existed any more.  Somehow I had the presence of mind to grab another grenade and drop it at my feet.  The two knights beside me crumpled, crushed or suffocated by their suits, leaving only the paladin.  My ears were all crackling and gurgling from blood and bone and god knows what else.  My nose ran with choking fluid and skull fragments and cartilage pressed in on my airways.  I tasted nothing but iron and smoke.  My streaming vision wavered and swam in red.  All I felt was pain and rage.  I couldn’t think, I couldn’t hear, I couldn’t smell, I could barely see or taste.  It was no wonder I didn’t notice the door to Goodneighbor swinging open.  

“Coyote!”

It took all my effort just to stay standing.  I did my best to stare down the paladin, but couldn’t be sure I was even looking at the right hazy grey shape.  After I heard my name, there was more yelling, but nothing I could make out.  Shots rang out.  I couldn’t hear the laser, but I heard a rifle and something even louder.  Metal hit the ground and the concussion rang through my aching skull as if the impact had struck me instead.  

Blood caught in my breath and I coughed again, spitting another stream of red onto the pavement.  A hand brushed my shoulder and years of fighting instinct set me on edge.  I flinched away from the touch and would have attacked, except I couldn’t see.  The blood in my eyes had blurred shapes beyond recognition.  I could barely make out patterns of light and dark and they made no sense to my fading consciousness.  I couldn’t breathe.  Every breath gurgled through blood and fluid and even what air I could draw in didn’t seem to help.  I knew I should breathe slowly, but my body refused to let that happen, and short, rapid gasps did even less to keep me going.  There were voices around me, or at least the modulating sound seemed to be speech.  Somebody grabbed my wrist but when my panicked mind drove me to attack, my consciousness faded completely.  

*       *       *

When we made it back to Goodneighbor, we found Coyote fighting the Brotherhood.  The paladin was the only one still alive and MacCready and I made short work of him.  We both ran to check on Coyote before the corpse even hit the ground.  From a distance, Coyote was covered in blood and I figured he had a concussion, but up close it was obvious that his skull had been fractured in a way that would have killed any normal man.  MacCready reached him first and touched his arm.  Coyote rounded on him, blood streaming from his eyes and mouth.  I’d seen the damage to his skull at a glance, but I guess the sniper hadn’t noticed it until Coyote turned to face him.  MacCready backed up fast and I don’t think it was due to Coyote’s admittedly terrifying expression.  The ex-legionary’s eyes were wide in some combination of pain, fear, and rage; with the blood no doubt pouring into his lungs, his mouth gaped and his rattling, panting gasps brought more red to his lips.  Even setting aside his snarl and the unnatural shape of his fractured skull, he looked like something out of a nightmare.  MacCready got sick from the sight and I didn’t find it particularly pleasant myself.  

“Coyote?”  His reaction to being touched could have been adrenaline, but he was probably disoriented.  I watched him reeling and noticed crimson lines along the back of his jaw.  His ears were bleeding.  That wasn’t surprising, but it might explain why he hadn’t answered us.  The blood in his eyes probably blinded him, and he might have been rendered at least temporarily deaf.  His nose looked broken as well, so even if his condition would let him recognize us by scent, I didn’t expect that to happen.  I doubted he even realized that the paladin was dead.  He expected a fight and had virtually no knowledge of anything around him.  He must be terrified; no wonder he’d lashed out.  

Coyote stumbled.  The bleeding hadn’t stopped and as I looked more closely, I saw two mostly cauterized wounds on his back and arm, presumably from the laser rifle.  It was a miracle he was even conscious.  

MacCready regained his composure a bit.  “Coyote?”  He didn’t seem to have noticed that I’d just asked that and received no response.  When our friend ignored him as well, he turned to me.  “What the fu—  What’s wrong with him?”

“Head trauma,” I stepped towards Coyote.  I did nothing to sneak or step quietly but Coyote didn’t react.  “I don’t think he can hear or see right now; he probably doesn’t know it’s us.”  MacCready started to ask something, but I didn’t hear him.  I grabbed Coyote’s wrist and somehow avoided cutting myself on his machete.  I needed to calm him down or at least restrain him and this was the only way I could think of to do that.  The idea was insane; the man was deadly in hand to hand combat and I barely remembered the simplest close-combat techniques I’d been taught.  From the moment I reached for his arm, I braced myself for a punch or a leg sweep or some other strike I couldn’t hope to deflect.  For an instant, I thought I saw one coming.  Coyote jerked his arm, either to pull it free or to drag me into some other attack, but I hardly felt the motion before his body crumpled like a marionette with its strings cut.  I almost didn’t manage to catch him.  

~       ~       ~

Between the two of us, MacCready and I got Coyote into his house and upstairs where he had a lantern and a bench.  We found Vulpes in the open doorway to the children’s room when we arrived and he luckily had the sense to close that door before approaching us.  

“What happened?”

He spoke quietly enough that the kids couldn’t hear and MacCready and I followed suit after we laid Coyote on the bench.  “The Brotherhood of Steel happened,” I answered bluntly, “do you have a first aid kit?”

Vulpes crossed the room to retrieve a black briefcase and handed it to me.  It turned out to be filled with rudimentary healing supplies.  For once I appreciated Inculta’s military attitude; he didn’t bother asking questions, he just got what I needed.  MacCready, on the other hand, had only helped carry Coyote when I practically begged him.  He looked around like he had half a dozen things he needed to do but couldn’t bring himself to leave Coyote and do any of them.  

In stark contrast to MacCready’s panicked twitchiness, Vulpes settled onto a chair beside me, watching Coyote with all the silent focus of a raven.  I think they were both very worried, they just had drastically different ways of showing it.  

Coyote was out cold.  He’d lost a lot of blood, but even now his body was trying to heal.  Running my fingers over his scalp as gently as possible, I could feel places where the bone had already begun to remodel.  I rolled him onto his side so I could examine the wounds on his back, but also so he wouldn’t aspirate.  

“How bad is it?”  MacCready paced rapidly, turning so fast that his hat fell off.  He replaced it very sloppily.  

“That’s what I’m trying to find out.”  I took stock of Zion’s wounds and checked his pulse and blood pressure.  “He’s lost a lot of blood,” I explained, “He might need a transfusion, or just a stimpak.”

MacCready practically rounded on me.  “You’re not sure?!”

Vulpes turned his gaze from the bench and frowned at the sniper.  Either he was on my side, or he was just annoyed that MacCready had shouted.  The kids were still in the other room, hopefully asleep.  

I answered as calmly and quietly as I could.  “I’m not sure because it’s a very difficult call to make.  Especially considering I can’t type anyone’s blood on such short notice, so a transfusion might be more risky.  The problem is, if his blood volume is too low the stimpak might kill him.”  

MacCready scowled and muttered under his breath, “Some doctor you are.”  

I shot him a glare, but Zion was more important right now.  We all heard something creak in the children’s room and Vulpes went over to investigate.  I judged that a transfusion would be more dangerous and injected a stimpak into his arm.  His burns had stopped bleeding but I didn’t want to remove the dead tissue until I was sure he could survive it.  I could see the medicine working as his skull began shifting back to a natural shape.  Despite myself, I grimaced.  MacCready shared my reaction.  

“That’s gotta be the most disgusting thing I’ve ever seen and I’ve got a long history of seeing really, really disgusting things…”  

Vulpes either didn’t see or didn’t care.  He stood in the doorway to the kids’ room again.  He was looking inside when I turned around to avoid watching Zion.  At least visible healing suggested that he was going to recover.  

A child whimpered from the bedroom.  “Daddy?”  Her voice caught in her throat, so I could tell she was scared.  She’d probably had a nightmare.  

Vulpes answered in such a kind and gentle tone that I shuddered.  Granted, these _were_ his kids, but I found it hard to imagine the man responsible for the Nipton massacre as a loving parent.  “Your father is not available at the moment.  Are you okay?”

“I had a bad dream.”  Quiet footsteps crossed the creaky floor.  Vulpes crouched in the doorway so the girl couldn’t see past him.  “Where’s daddy?”

I looked back at Coyote and found that his skull had healed.  He was still covered in blood and his skin had gotten about as pale as it possibly could, but the bones had mended.  I bandaged his burns as quickly as I could while still being careful.  I wanted him to recover before I treated them, and he probably wouldn’t replenish that much blood tonight.  

Behind me, Vulpes answered the girl.  “Daddy’s sleeping.”  Frankly, I was amazed that he didn’t just bluntly state the truth.  I wondered why MacCready didn’t intervene and, glancing behind me, I realized the sniper had disappeared.  I figured he’d needed a drink after watching Coyote heal.  

The girl stomped her foot.  “I-I want to see daddy!”  She was clearly determined, but I guess Vulpes’ ability to passively terrify worked even on his children.  

I scrubbed the blood off Coyote as gently as I could and draped a blanket over him.  To an untrained eye, he looked like he might have been sleeping.  His breaths were still shallow and his skin was still pale and cold, but he’d already become more stable than I’d expected.  I felt confident that he’d survive and hoped that wasn’t just because, for once, things seemed to be going well in my life.  

Vulpes hesitantly began some explanation that was probably a lie and I cut him off, answering more loudly.  “It’s okay, just… don’t wake him up.”

Vulpes glanced over.  Seeing Coyote passably asleep, he stood and stepped back, letting the girl into the room.  If I’d heard her name, I didn’t remember it.  Her long black hair stuck out in all directions, tears streaked her dark skin, and her strikingly pale eyes bore an uncanny resemblance to her ruthless father but held none of his sangfroid.  She sniffled and hesitated in the doorway, staring at me.  Zion had three kids.  I was just surprised that even three of them had survived.  

I gestured at Zion.  “He’s asleep.”  I pointed it out because I felt I should say something, but didn’t really know what to say.  I wasn’t particularly good with adults; I had even less skill dealing with children.  

The six-year-old narrowed her eyes, looked over her father’s unmoving form, and then met my gaze.  “Why’s he sleeping on the bench?”

I hesitated and Vulpes answered.  “He was very tired.”

“Why didn’t you move him to the bed?  The bed’s more comfy.”

“We didn’t want to wake him.”  This time I spoke before Vulpes.  “It’s very important that he gets some rest, we don’t want to wake him up.”  

“Why?”  Of course, this was the daughter of two of the most inquisitive men I’d ever met, she was going to question everything we told her.  

Once again, Vulpes replied first.  “Your father doesn’t get much sleep.  He needs to rest.  You should get some sleep as well.”

She shook her head violently, draping her face in wild strands of hair.  “No,” the girl answered, brushing her bangs back, “I can sleep later.”  She took another five steps towards Coyote and froze, pressing herself against the wall to avoid getting any closer to me.  

After treating her father, I’d settled myself onto the floor in front of him.  I hadn’t thought to grab a chair, but there were several around the table and I got up to get one now.  I moved another chair over and set it by the bench, facing Zion.  I sat a little further away, hoping his daughter would feel comfortable enough to approach.  “I’m not going to hurt you.”

She stared at me, frozen against the wall.  Her answer was barely a whisper and I could only guess at what she said.  “He told me the same thing.”

“Who did?”

A bed creaked and Vulpes slunk into the children’s room.  Apparently someone else had woken up.  

The girl teared up again.  “Abraham.”

“Oh.”  Now it made sense.  I tried to reassure her.  “I promise, I will never hurt you.  I’m a close friend of Z— of your father.  I heard what happened to your family, and I swear I will do everything I can to make sure that never happens again.”  

I could hear Vulpes speaking softly in the other room.  The girl glanced towards the doorway and then stepped nervously towards me.  “I—” she squeaked, “I-If you were really good friends with daddy… d-do you know his real name?”

I could hear that Vulpes was still talking to one of the boys, but I still whispered.  “Zion.”

Zion might have heard his name, because at that moment he groaned and rolled onto his stomach, one arm dropping heavily onto the floor.  His breathing was deeper.  He might actually be asleep now.  

The girl, who had calmed down immensely, turned towards her father like she planned to rush forward and hug him, but thought better of it.  She ignored the chair I’d moved for her and sat down on the floor, pressing her back against my ankles.  Vulpes walked through the kitchen to grab a bottle of purified water and return to the kids’ room.  I’d been hunched forward for a long time, first leaning over Zion, and then leaning forward to address his daughter.  Now I leaned back and felt the wooden back of the chair for the first time.  I hadn’t felt this safe or peaceful in years.  

But the Brotherhood was still out there.  I didn’t know why they had come to Goodneighbor, but I could guess.  They might not even know who I was out here and they still managed to threaten everyone I cared about.  This time I couldn’t even run, I couldn’t just uproot Zion and his family like that, and now I’d dragged them into this.  This was the reason I hadn’t just worn my power armor to Med-Tek.  I should have hidden it better.  I should have disguised it.  I should have… fuck.  

I leaned forward again, resting my elbows on my knees and my face in my hands, pushing my dirty glasses up onto my hair.  

The girl looked up at me.  “Are you okay?”

I lied without even thinking.  “Yeah.  I’m just very tired.”

She smiled.  “Daddy does need to sleep.  He’s always awake, it seems like all night.”  She looked over at her father and added more softly.  “It’s probably why he looks so tired all the time.”

“Oh?”  If he’d kept three kids alive on his own, in the wasteland, I wasn’t surprised he didn’t sleep much.  And this as Zion, who didn’t really take good care of himself as it was.  

“Yeah,” the girl explained, picking at the tattered leather of my combat boots.  “He didn’t sleep at all for a long time because he had to watch for bad stuff, but then he got sort of sick because he didn’t sleep.  And then we came here.  Now he still watches for bad stuff a lot, but he sleeps a little too.  And sometimes he just stays in bed and makes weird noises.”  

I raised an eyebrow.  If that meant what I thought it meant, I hoped to change the subject.  

“Anyway… what’s your name?”

“Jay.”

“Jay?”  I wasn’t sure I’d heard her right, but she nodded.  “Like a blue jay?”

Jay looked up from my boots.  “What’s a blue J?”

I’d figured she was named after the bird considering Zion’s other name choices, but either I was wrong or Zion had never explained his daughter’s name to her.  “It’s a bird.  Or it was, they were blue.”  I thought about it and added under my breath, “They’re probably extinct.”

Jay heard me.  “What’s `extinct’?”

I sighed.  “It’s when even the last one of something is dead.”

“Oh,” Jay answered, deflated, “Like ponies.”

“Ponies?”  Zion had certainly outdone himself teaching his kids.  

Jay explained eagerly, “They were like little brahmin with prettier hair and only one head.  Daddy got me two books about them.  They have really cute pictures.”

I managed to smile at her explanation and tried not to dwell on my worry about the Brotherhood.  They wouldn’t come looking for me tonight, would they?  They probably didn’t even know their patrol was dead.  We were safe.  For now.  I hoped.  

After a few minutes of silence, Vulpes emerged from the kid’s room and closed the door behind him.  He got himself a glass of water and looked over at Jay and I.  He raised an eyebrow and observed, “She warmed to you very quickly.”

I nodded.  Jay nodded as well.  

Vulpes narrowed his eyes and then shrugged.  He crossed the room and paused in the doorway.  “Do you expect the sniper to return tonight?”

Now it was my turn to shrug.  “I’m not even positive why he left.  Does he live here?”

“I am hardly an expert on the man,” Vulpes replied between sips of his water.  “I daresay I know him even less well than you do.  Although I am certain that he was living with Coyote before our arrival.”

Jay piped up.  “Are you talking about MacCready?”

We both looked at her.  “Yes.”

Jay picked at the laces of my boots as she answered.  “He slept in daddy’s bed.  He doesn’t go anywhere but here and the Third Rail.”

“Ah,” Vulpes remarked and clarified to me, “the bar.”  He finished his drink and set the glass on the counter.  “I will retrieve our wayward sniper.  I believe you can monitor the children, Dr. Gannon?”

“Sure?”  I wasn’t the most confident in that reply and I’m sure Vulpes noted that, but I guess he felt I was better than nothing.  He went downstairs and I heard the door lock behind him.  Jay looked up from my boots.  

“Your shoes are really, really dirty, Gannon, you must have been to lots and lots of places.”

Her use of just my surname unnerved me a little.  It felt like she was addressing my father.  I’d heard him called Gannon more than Israel, so it was even more unsettling than when I heard her brother’s name.  “Yeah.”  I glanced at Coyote just to see if he’d awakened, and found him still deeply asleep.  “Can you just call me `Arcade’?”

Jay frowned.  “Why?”

“Because Arcade’s my first name.”  Thinking about it, it made sense.  Zion didn’t use his first name almost at all, MacCready evidently preferred his surname, and they probably didn’t know many other adults.  I hadn’t heard them address Vulpes at all yet, so they might not even know his name.  Or they could think that Vulpes was his last name.  

Jay frowned like my explanation was the strangest idea she’d ever heard.  “You want me to use your _first_ name?”

“Yeah.  Actually, most people just use their first names.  Unless they don’t know each other.”  

“Daddy doesn’t.  MacCready doesn’t.”

“Your father’s a bit… strange.”  The floor creaked in the kid’s room as I added, “And MacCready seems to use his surname with most people.”  Not that he would have much reason to be on a first-name basis with me, but I just wanted to reassure her.  

“Oh.”  Jay untied one of my boots through the course of her fiddling with the laces and the string had frayed where the knot normally formed.  “Your shoes are really old, aren’t they?”

“Yeah, they are.”  Considering my boots were pretty filthy and I would probably be spending the night here anyway, I carefully took them off.  The soles had been falling off for years and it seemed that they’d finally reached the point where my constant repairs would not hold much longer.  I hated having to find new shoes as so few fit, but I’d probably need to go looking again pretty soon.  It was something I’d put off for years.  Shoes just hadn’t been a high priority compared to basic survival.  

I set my boots in the corner of the stairwell, hopefully out of the way, and returned to Jay.  

She was looking at her father with concern.  When I got back and sat down, I realized blood had soaked through the bandage on his arm.  

“Daddy’s going to be okay, right?”

I leaned forward to check his pulse and blood pressure and Jay watched in tense silence.  Zion’s wound hadn’t clotted, or else it had reopened.  His pulse was stronger and his blood pressure wasn’t so worryingly low.  I’d need to risk clearing away the dead tissue so the bleeding would stop.  “Your father is going to be just fine.  Jay, go wait in your bed, I’ll come and get you when you can come back out here.”

“I want to stay!”

I tried to think of the sort of things my family told me when I was her age.  “Everything’s going to be okay, I need you to watch your brothers for a few minutes.”  Granted, I’d never had siblings.  Judah had given me similar orders to watch the few kids younger than I was back when Navarro was under attack.  One of the many times.  It seemed like it would work better to give her a job rather than to just insist that she leave or tell her why.  I didn’t want to worry her even more.  

My instincts proved correct, the girl bit her lip and nodded like a soldier.  She rushed off into the bedroom and I heard talking inside.  

“What’s happening?”  The voice was Fox, and he spoke groggily.  

Jay explained curtly.  “Daddy’s hurt.”

Fox stomped towards the door and I guess she stopped him.  “No!  We hav’ta stay _here_.”

“Why?”

“`Cause I need to watch _both_ of you, and he’s asleep.”

There was a pause.  “Yeah,” Fox insisted, “but he can’t _go_ anywhere.”

“That’s _mean!_ ”

“It’s true,” Fox answered bluntly, every bit his father to the point that I scowled at my scalpel.  I’d already gotten Zion stripped to the waist and removed his bandages.  Looking more closely, I could tell the burns had reached too deeply.  They’d nicked arteries and the only reason I hadn’t noticed sooner was because his low blood volume had slowed their bleeding.  And I was never quite sure what to expect in terms of his healing ability.  I cut away the burned tissue and was pleasantly surprised when the wounds mended instantly.  Even half-dead from blood-loss, Zion could heal that quickly.  It took carrying six children to slow his healing just to normal human levels.  This disease _had_ to be engineered.  

I put clean bandages on the wounds and wrapped the blanket around him before checking his pulse.  In the few minutes it took me to tend to his wounds, his pulse had become almost nonexistent.  There were dozens of possible causes, but the most likely was that he’d simply bled too much while I’d had the wound exposed.  His blood pressure had dropped as well, probably for the same reasons.  He’d become hypothermic without another blanket, but at least his bleeding has stopped.  

The door to the children’s room creaked open and Fox rushed in followed by Jay.  

Fox stared at Zion’s unconscious form and then frowned at me.  “What happened?”

Attributing his tone to worry, I got straight to the point.  “Are there any other blankets in this house?  He needs more than one or he’ll get too cold.”

“He can have mine!” Jay suggested.  

Before I could explain that she needed one too, Fox replied, “We have ten in the closet, and he has two on his bed, I can get them all.”  He was down the hall before I could correct him.  Jay started into the bedroom and I caught her.  

“He only needs a few.”

She sniffled.  “But I want to help…”  

“I know.”  I led her back over to Zion and lifted his wrist.  “Hold his arm right here,” I explained, giving her a crash course in how to take a pulse, “put your fingers here, very lightly.  Feel that?”  She frowned and then nodded.  I really hoped she wasn’t just agreeing with me; I could barely feel his pulse myself.  “Tell me if that gets any harder to feel.  Or easier.  Just, tell me if it changes.”  I turned around in time to see Fox rushing into the room covered in blankets.  

“I got five, but I can go get the rest, hold on.”  

I caught him as well.  “Five is plenty.”  

In two minutes, three of those blankets sat folded on the table and two wrapped Zion.  Jay sat on the floor beside the bench, holding his wrist with a level of focus to rival both her fathers’.  After another ten minutes of reasoning with Fox, both children sat on the floor at their father’s side, snuggled under a third blanket and fighting sleep to keep an eye on Zion.  I sat on the chair beside them with my hands folded against my chin.  

If Zion could replenish his blood, and didn’t clot from the internal bleeding due to his skull fracture, he should be physically fine.  And with his healing ability, I hoped that he would recover.  Right now, my main concern was that he had yet to wake up.  With this much blood loss, I’d have been shocked if he did regain consciousness this early, but considering how visibly shattered his skull had been, his brain might be damaged.  I couldn’t tell until he woke up.  If he woke up.  The blow to his head would have killed anyone else, he might have slipped into a coma.  I desperately hoped that wasn’t the case.  Even if he recovered, he wouldn’t have been put in danger at all if I hadn’t left Enclave power armor out in the open.  I’d been careless.  Why hadn’t I hidden it?  I hadn’t even warned him!

Thoughts verging on panic circled in my mind like a caged dog until they finally came to rest.  Between my worry about the Brotherhood and my worry about Zion, I felt more emotionally drained that I’d felt in six years.  Managing two frightened six-year-olds had only added to that.  

Sometime between the retrieval of the blankets and when I found myself too exhausted to worry, Fox had fallen asleep.  He lay curled up amid the tan weave of the blanket while Jay sat beside him, still raptly feeling her father’s wrist as if she could stay awake for days.  It struck me how often I’d been able to stave off sleep in a similar way when I was her age.  Granted, I hadn’t been monitoring a pulse so much as keeping watch.  I was pretty tired as well and found myself blankly timing the rise and fall of Zion’s back while I sank into a daze born of stress and exhaustion.  

At some point, Vulpes and MacCready ascended the stairs to the kitchen and paused by the table.  

“Is he going to be alright?”

The sniper’s speech was slurred, so I presumed Vulpes and I had guessed correctly.  With Jay staring at Zion’s wrist, I shrugged in response and hoped MacCready wouldn’t announce my doubts.  Rather than answer aloud, I heard him retreat to the bedroom he’d shared with Zion.  He closed the door a little more loudly than necessary.  

Vulpes watched in silence.  “Fox heard you?”

I shrugged again, but this time I answered verbally as well.  “He woke up.  He wanted to help.”

“Of course he did,” Vulpes answered softly, “Coyote has been raising him well.  Coyote has been raising all of them well.”  There was a note of regret in his normally emotionless voice.  I could guess why.  I felt that Zion was probably better off for raising his kids alone, but I could see where Vulpes was coming from.  Even if, personally, there was never any chance that I’d have kids myself, it had to be difficult to father children and have no part in their lives.  Even for a notorious war criminal.  

Vulpes leaned against the counter and fell silent.  I didn’t turn around to try and guess what he might be thinking.  

“I can keep vigil, if you need sleep.”  I don’t know if he offered out of some desire to repay me for saving his life, if this was simply one soldier wishing to ensure that someone awake and attentive kept watch, or if Vulpes himself had really changed and become a genuinely decent person since we’d last met.  Whichever it was, my answer remained unchanged.  

“No.  He might go into hypovolemic shock, he could suffer a stroke, there’s too many variables.  I need to be here.”  

I expected him to go somewhere to sleep, but he didn’t.  Instead chair legs grated over the floor and he pulled up a seat beside me.  Vulpes Inculta, keeping vigil with me over the man who’d deceived him for years with one of the men who’d essentially brought down the army he’d helped lead.  The frumentarius was loyal to Zion, I’d give him that.  

I lost track of time.  Coyote’s breathing got gradually stronger and every so often, Jay would look up and mention that his pulse was easier to feel.  His blood pressure was getting back to a more normal range; I’d check it whenever it felt like an hour had passed.  He was still very weak, but I started to think he might really recover.  It was still hours before dawn when Jay really started to doze off.  She’d nod forward and then jolt upright as she started to fall asleep and shook it off again.  

“You can go sleep, Jay,” I suggested, “I can check his pulse myself now.”  I could have done so since the blankets were retrieved, but having been in similar positions when I was young, I’d figured she would be happier if she felt she was helping.  

Jay shook her head adamantly.  “I want to do it!”

“Okay…”  Well, she’d fall asleep eventually.  

For the next hour or more, I continued my silent vigil, taking stock of Zion’s breath and blood pressure at regular intervals and otherwise watching him in worried silence.  Vulpes sat beside me like a statue, resolutely focused on Zion as if ready to fend off any threat to the man’s life via quick reflexes and a machete.  His stare was a little unnerving.  Fox was fast asleep, sprawled on the blanket in such a way that I did not expect to wake him even if I had to carry him somewhere.  Eventually, pure force of will was not enough for Jay to stave off sleep.  I heard her singing under her breath.  There were a few songs, no more than five, but she paused in several as if she didn’t recall the lyrics and soon it was just one long song, recited over and over like a mantra, and so quietly that I couldn’t make it out.  

Jay had perfect pitch just like her father, at least as best as I could tell, and something about the barely audible string of notes was hauntingly familiar.  After it had gone on for half an hour, I found myself humming along.  I guess this encouraged her.  Jay glanced back to make sure that Vulpes didn’t seem bothered by her singing and sang a bit louder.  This time I heard the words clearly.  

“…And the rockets’ red glare,

“The bombs bursting in air,

“Gave proof through the night,

“That our flag was still there…”

She trailed off as she noticed my stare.  

“What is it?”

“How do you know that song?”  She seemed afraid that she’d done something wrong, so I added, “It’s okay, that song just has different meaning for some people.”

Jay fidgeted nervously, but admitted, “It was in a book daddy’s mama gave him.  I-It’s about how even when everything looks really bad, there’s still hope, right?  At least that verse.  I don’t really understand all the verses.”

I sighed and smiled.  “Yeah.  A lot of people don’t.  You can sing that in here, but you probably shouldn’t sing that outside, okay?”

Jay and Vulpes answered in unison.  “Why?”  Of course the frumentarius had noticed.  Of course he was suddenly curious as to why a seemingly innocuous song would provoke this reaction.  

“That song’s…  it’s associated with a group of people who did very bad things.  Most people don’t remember them, but if the people who do hear you singing that song, they might try to hurt you.”  

Vulpes stared like he could see into my soul and I scowled at him.  “What are you thinking?”

“I am thinking you may be more interesting than you appear.”

“Stop thinking that.  I’m boring.  Really.”

There was a hoarse laugh from the bench.  “You always say that and I have never once believed you.”  

Jay, Vulpes, and I each cried out the name we most associated with Zion and luckily the cacophony drowned out our individual cries.  Jay tackled her father in a hug as Zion reeled and coughed.  

“Jeez!  I feel like I fell off a building, could you be a little quieter?”

“Sorry.”  Jay and I apologized while Vulpes went into the other room and returned with Israel.  As the boy didn’t seem surprised to see his father lying down on the bench and looked just as happy as Jay to see Zion alive, I figured Vulpes must have told him what had happened.  

Zion tried to stand with Jay still clinging to his neck and I somehow convinced him to stay seated despite great resistance.  He was hungry.  Vulpes got to work cooking a pre-dawn breakfast while I ran through a memory test.  

“I’m _fine_ ,” Zion insisted after the second question, “I’m just very tired and I’ve got one hell of a headache.”  I almost believed him.  At least I knew he would probably be okay as long as he took it easy today, barring any more Brotherhood attacks.  But this was Zion, who never took it easy when he had people to protect.  

Once they’d all had some time with Zion, Vulpes and I put the kids back to bed and sat down to eat a surprisingly tasty breakfast.  Evidently, Vulpes could cook.  Zion ate like he hadn’t eaten in years, presumably because healing took a lot out of him.  All three of us were visibly exhausted, so conversation suffered to the point that we all ate in silence.  As the last piece of molerat bacon disappeared off Zion’s plate, he reasoned, “KL-E-0 will have cleared up the Brotherhood patrol and even if their equipment is traced back to her, it’s more likely that they’ll assume she was just scavenging or bought it from scavengers.  Even if they know where the patrol vanished, this is Goodneighbor, and they shouldn’t suspect anything in this rough neighborhood unless they find the armor.”  He looked up at me.  “You should be able to store it in Bobbi’s old place, right around the corner, as long as you talk to Hancock and get the keys.  Why did you leave it behind?”

His absolute focus on that one problem and the speed at which he reasoned out a temporary solution left my tired mind dazed for a second.  “Uh, that’s sort of… a long story.”  It really wasn’t, at least not the way I planned to tell him, but I didn’t want to discuss this in front of Vulpes, who already looked like a cat that had spotted a bird.  

Down the hall, MacCready groaned and we all heard him get out of bed.  Zion frowned towards the bedroom and then launched into a second suggestion, every inch the soldier he hadn’t been in years.  “Where’s Geiger?  Not that I expect him in the house, I just want to know.  He should be able to deter Brotherhood scouts, if necessary.  Vulpes, could you check that there isn’t anything else at the scene of the fight to suggest our presence?”  He winced and rubbed his head gingerly.  Vulpes finished the last of his meal, nodded and left, presumably to do as he’d been asked.  

“Geiger made a friend.  He seemed like he’d follow us back here eventually.”  I ran my fingers over Zion’s skull to check for any remaining fractures.  “You should really rest.”  

MacCready staggered into the kitchen and froze in the doorway.  “Coyote…”  I wasn’t sure if he’d planned to say something and thought better of it or if he’d meant to exclaim the man’s name, but lacked the energy.  

I remembered the purpose of our multi-day escapade very belatedly.  “You got that cure to whoever needed it?”

“Yeah.” MacCready answered groggily, getting himself a drink of water, “Well, on its way.”

Zion smiled.  “Good.”

“Yeah.”  MacCready turned to face him and the awkwardness was palpable.  

When it went on for more than a minute I coughed uncomfortably.  “I’m…I’m going to go move my armor.”  

*       *       *

Neither of us said anything until we heard Arcade lock the door behind him.  

“Sorry.”

“Yeah…”  Evidently MacCready said that when he had no idea what to say.  I would have stood except I wasn’t sure I could trust my brain to keep my feet underneath me right now.  

“I didn’t ever expect to see either of them again, really.”  

“I know.”

“I know that probably doesn’t make this any easier…”

“It doesn’t.”

“Look, you’re a great guy, RJ—”

“You really don’t have to say that.”

“I do.  I mean it.”

He stopped and just stared at me.  I couldn’t tell if he was moved or pissed off.  I hoped the former.  “Really,” I insisted, “You’re a great guy.  You’re going to be very happy with someone, just… not me.”

“You know, I _want_ to believe that, but why the hell did you even start something with me, when…  Why did you ever leave _them_?”

I sat up a bit straighter.  “Whoa.  Vulpes is a _friend_.  My thing with him was more… one-sided.  I…”  I fell silent for a moment to really consider what exactly I felt for Arcade.  “I love Arcade.  If things had turned out differently, I would never have left his side.”

The sniper gave me a skeptical stare, but I continued explaining before he could question me.  “I was pregnant.  Pregnant with six kids.  I’d deserted the army of one nation which made me an enemy of another.  I had two armies and dozens of other people out for my head and I was living in the city they were fighting over.  Arcade was dating the man who turned the tide of that war.  I couldn’t stay and he couldn’t leave.”

MacCready raised an eyebrow.  “You’re dumping me for a guy who was only dating you on the side?”

“It wasn’t like that.”  I got up and stumbled into the hall towards the bedroom where I leaned against the wall across from MacCready.  “I tried to start something.  He refused because he was already with someone else.  We both wanted it, but nothing really happened at the time.  If it had, I probably would have stayed despite the armies.”  

MacCready’s face fell, but he tried to hide it.  “I should probably go.”

“Go where?”

“I don’t know.  Back to the Capitol, I guess.  Back to the farm.”

“You’re no farmer.”

“What?” he snapped, “I can be whatever I fucking want to be, alright?  We don’t have to stay mercs and soldiers forever.”

I held up my hands in surrender and realized my arms were shaking.  “I didn’t mean—”

He sighed, noticing how weak I was right now.  I needed rest, we both knew that and right now I might even admit it.  “Look, sorry, alright?  I just…  I really thought this was…  Nevermind.”

He turned to leave and I caught his arm.  “Hey.  I know what you thought, I thought the same.  But that isn’t the way things happened, I’m sorry.  You can stay here as long as you want, I don’t want you rushing off without thinking and getting yourself killed, I know how you work.”  

He raised an eyebrow.  “Stay here?  Where, on the roof?”  

I shrugged.  “I can clear out a room downstairs, reinforce it, make a bed, whatever you need.”  

“I would advise against doing so _today_.”  Vulpes pointed out, having returned to the kitchen without either of us noticing him.  “There is no evidence of us outside of this house, save the power armor,” he reported, “Also, Geiger has returned along with at least three wild deathclaws.  They have formed a small nest in the ruined building outside Goodneighbor and are frightening some of the locals.”  He sipped some water and added, “Coyote should rest, but if necessary, I can assist clearing a room, reinforcing it, and crafting furniture.  With the Brotherhood likely alerted to the loss of their patrol, I would appreciate keeping such a skilled sniper in the area for as long as possible.”  Knowing Vulpes, he had added the later comment solely because he knew it would sway MacCready.  I was absolutely awe-struck that he had read RJ so easily.  

MacCready considered, no doubt thinking of Duncan and wondering how awkward it would be living near me now that Arcade was back in my life.  But, as Vulpes pointed out, the sniper would certainly help keep the town and the kids safe from the Brotherhood.  And Duncan should be fine once the cure arrived.  Maybe he could even come North, or we could all go live in the Capitol.  I had other ideas in case that couldn’t happen, but they were desperate and violent, and I didn’t want to be forced to act on them.  As long as everyone was safe, or mostly safe, I had no need for such plans.  Right now it was only the Brotherhood that loomed as a significant threat to that hope.  

“Alright…”  MacCready shrugged and started downstairs, presumably to survey the unused room and start making one livable.  Vulpes locked me in a pointed stare.  

“What?”

“Last night you endured injury that would have killed any ordinary man.  It nearly killed _you_.  You are going to rest for the rest of the day.”  He pointed to the bedroom like the classic image of the stern father.  

For a long moment, I met his gaze in defiance and then I sighed, letting my aching shoulders sag.  “Yeah, you’re right.  You can keep everything under control for twenty-four hours.”  I staggered off to bed.  I phased in and out of sleep for the next hour.  

*       *      *

I moved the power armor into the alley beside Coyote’s house and hid it as best as I could before going to find Hancock and get the key.  I didn’t know or particularly care if he was delusional or if he’d just chosen the name as an homage to history or without knowledge of its meaning; with the state of the rest of the Commonwealth, Goodneighbor was a veritable paradise under his rule.  

I asked for Hancock and after several moments of suspicious stares, a towering woman yelled at the guards I’d spoken to.  “The boss has been looking for him, send him up.”  

That was a worrying notion if I’d ever heard one.  I followed her anyway.  

Hancock sat half-sprawled on a couch surrounded by drug paraphenalia.  I couldn’t see his pupils clearly enough to know for certain if he was high and I couldn’t always tell with ghouls anyway, but I could assume.  Still, he locked me in a stare that showed more clearity than I expected.  “I’m all for stickin’ it to the man, but we aren’t really prepped to take on the Brotherhood.  We haven’t had any trouble with them until you showed up, so what is it, did you steal that armor?”  He had an edge to his voice that was either chems or a question he wasn’t asking.  I hadn’t expected him to ask directly why the Brotherhood was after me, and I hesitated.  Granted, Zion wasn’t _living_ with him, but they did seem to be friends.  And Zion seemed to like him.  Knowing Zion, I wagered that Hancock would appreciate my honesty.  He was probably fairly intelligent, even if the chems and abundant empty mentat boxes suggested otherwise.  

“I was born into an organization called the Enclave.”  I paused, hoping for a glimmer of recognition and got none, so I continued, “Most people don’t remember them, but they did bad things, and they made an enemy of the Brotherhood.  The armor was my father’s, and even without it, the Brotherhood would hunt me down if they knew my history.  I was never really a part of the Enclave myself, the base where I was born was destroyed when I was still a kid, I’ve just been—”  

“You got screwed over by birth and ever since folks have been after you for who your family was.”  Hancock nodded in understanding, “Believe me, I get where you’re coming from, man.”  

I laughed nervously.  “To be honest, that’s really not the reaction I expected.”

Hancock got up to retrieve an unopened box of mentats.  “Yeah.  It’s not really the same scale, but long story short, my brother is an asshole.”  He sat back down, popped a handful of mentats and offered some to me.  

I somehow managed not to grimace.  “No, thanks.”

Hancock shrugged and scarfed those down as well.  “So why’d you come here?”

“Z-Coyote mentioned someone called Bobby?  He said I might be able to hide my armor in Bobby’s old place?”

Hancock laughed.  “You know Coyote’s first name, don’t you?  He won’t tell anyone, but people have asked, and now you got me wondering again.”  He got more serious and added, “Yeah, I can have Fahrenheit give you the keys.  It should be safe there.”

“Thanks.”

Hancock nodded, “Any friend of Coyote’s is a friend of mine.  The more folks he has keeping an eye on those kids, the better.”  

I nodded in agreement and stood to leave before he could offer me more drugs.  Halfway to the stairs, Hancock called after me, “You take good care of that crazy bastard, alright?  He’s a good catch.”  

“I will.”  Whatever his addictions, at least Hancock seemed somewhat loyal to Zion.  I wondered what their history was.  Knowing Zion, and the casual way he interacted with the mayor, I figured they’d been in combat together.  That was usually a safe assumption in the wasteland.  

I moved the armor and shut it down, locking it and rendering it nearly impossible to detect.  I’d done the same in the Mojave and right now I didn’t plan to move it again any time soon.  Before she’d given me the keys, Fahrenheit had suggested that I stay indoors for a while.  Apparently, as I was a friend of Zion, Hancock had stuck his neck out a bit.  He’d decided that, if I planned to stay in town and if the Brotherhood really had come looking for me, he’d spread rumors that I left, heading North, and hopefully the Brotherhood would believe those and stop looking for me here.  

I found Vulpes and MacCready clearing out a downstairs room for the sniper.  I guess MacCready took comfort working cooperatively with someone, even Vulpes, because he managed to sound almost happy as they discussed the best method to reinforce the ceiling.  I didn’t really feel like chatting with them after last night.  Somehow they didn’t hear me as I locked the door and went upstairs.  The kids were still asleep, judging by the silence, and with Zion nowhere to be found, I went into his bedroom to make sure he was okay.  In all likelihood he just needed to take it easy, but there was still a chance that he might bleed or clot and I would never be able to rest unless I made sure that hadn’t happened.  

I found him awake on his back in an impressively well-made bed.  Considering what he had to work with I’d really started to think Zion had found a hidden calling making furniture.  Or else frumentari were better engineers than I’d ever realized.  

“You should probably try to sleep.”

Zion looked over at me.  “Probably.”  He had a thoughtful note to his voice.  

“You have some better method of healing head trauma?”

He started to shake his head and then grimaced.  “No.”  He still sounded pensive.  

“What is it?”

“Just thinking.”  Zion rolled onto his side, turning his full attention to me for the first time since last night.  “Thanks, by the way.”

“For getting MacCready to Med-Tek or for saving your life?”

“Both,” Zion replied, “especially the latter.  And for…  Why did you come out here?”

He patted the bed beside him, so I sat down.  “That’s a long story.”

“I figured.”  

Zion shuffled around under the blankets until he lay beside me with his head on his hands, wild hair slowly settling into a flatter state.  When I stayed silent for a few minutes, he told his own story.  “I went to my tribe when I left the Mojave.  My father turned me away because he assumed I’d left willingly the first time, so I followed old roads into the mountains, to the dead village where I was born.”

“Creede?”

He rolled onto his side to stare at me.  “Yes.  I didn’t think anyone else had even heard of it.”

I rested my chin on my hands.  “I… I stayed there for a while.  Recently.”  Thinking of his mother made me wonder if he knew.  I doubted that he did, whenever anything related to the Enclave happened, he seemed totally clueless, but he had been a spy for many years.  

Zion opened his mouth to speak, but before he could say anything, I asked, “Do you know much about your mother?”

He frowned and then shrugged.  “Not really.  She had red hair, like Israel’s.  And blue eyes.  She stood up to my father more than anyone else in the tribe.  Mostly, she told me to read; she taught me songs and old stories.  I don’t remember much else, I was very young when she was killed.  Why?”

It worried me that his mother had been killed, given what I knew of Russel, but that was the past, they were thousands of miles away right now.  “Did you know your mother was a member of the Enclave?  Do you know what the Enclave is?”

He shook his head very slowly.  “No.  What is it?”  

I explained, summarizing much as I had for Hancock, and for Wolf, when I’d explained it to him.  Zion studied his fingers thoughtfully.  “She told me to be wary of vertibirds.  Now I’m not sure if she meant the Brotherhood or the Enclave.”

I shrugged.  “Right now, the former is probably the bigger threat.”  He moved to sit beside me, awkwardly swinging his legs out from under the blanket, but I barely noticed.  “I left my armor here so the Brotherhood wouldn’t recognize it while I was traveling with MacCready.  I thought it would be safer here, I never thought…”  I ran my hands through my hair and he stopped me, wrapping an arm around my shoulders to pull me into a hug.  

“It sounds like the Brotherhood have been after you for a long time.”  There was a troubling note to his voice, part scheme and part threat, or maybe just anger.  Considering how protective he’d always been, I wasn’t surprised.  I didn’t know for certain if the Brotherhood had attacked him or if he’d started the fight, but even after having been a pacifist, what happened at Sanctuary could have changed him.  He certainly seemed more like a soldier than a philosopher today.  

“You have no idea.”

He snuggled against my shoulder and continued his story, “I left Creede after I gave birth.”  Zion hesitated for a moment and then admitted in a monotone rush, “I had six kids, two dead at birth, Israel barely survived and I almost died as well.  Somehow I kept everyone alive on the journey east, we lived at Walden Pond for a while.  Then… then we moved to… to Sanctuary… then Sanctuary _happened_ …”  He choked up for a moment and I returned his hug.  Zion slid his arm off my back and rested his face in his hands before he slid them down to stare at the window over folded fingers.  He teared up.  Then his expression became blank.  Gradually he seemed to brighten again.  He didn’t make a sound until his smile returned and then he concluded almost in defiance.  “I brought Jay and Israel here, to Goodneighbor.  I knew Hancock.  The town’s rough, but he’s a good mayor and this is probably the safest place aside from Diamond City.  I met MacCready.  At first he was just helping keep the kids safe, and then I was helping him.  And then…  I’m glad you’re here, though.  I don’t really know…  I don’t think I ever really expected you to survive the war.  In truth, I figured that even if you did, there was no way you’d find me all the way out here.”  

He looked up at me, that smile even more dazzling after all the pain he’d just recounted.  For the first time, I kissed him first and he kissed me back.  

~       ~       ~

Despite my insistence that he should rest, we ended up postponing sleep even further.  

I lay beside him on the bed, both of us on our stomachs.  He had his bad knee twisted slightly and I could feel the scarring of the joint against my thigh.  Whatever surgery Abraham had performed must have incorporated genetics or something because only the scars it left even hinted that he had ever been anything but male.  I didn’t mention it aloud and neither did he.  

I’d planned to fall asleep, considering I’d been awake for nearly thirty-six hours by this point, but I noticed a pensive gleam in Zion’s eyes yet again and couldn’t help but ask, “What are you thinking about?”

“You’re going grey.”

“I’m going _white_ , my hair was pale to begin with.”

He chuckled at my self-consciousness and ran a hand through it.  “There aren’t a lot of people with pale hair, I like it.  But I know you don’t, so I wasn’t planning to say anything.”

I muttered an incomprehensible response into the blankets and closed my eyes.  

Zion scooted even closer to me and rested his chin on my arm.  His beard tickled.  

“You look like you’ve been through as much as I have in the past six years.”

“Not really.”  I considered.  I wanted to tell him.  I’d already touched on the incredibly daunting threat of the Brotherhood, and that was more or less the past six years of my life, in a nut shell.  

Before I could elaborate, Zion took my pause as a conclusion.  “If you’re willing to talk about it, can I ask what happened to Wolf?”

The question roused anger, maybe even hate that I hadn’t realized I still harbored.  It had been years and it had dulled but not dissipated.  The emotional wound had mostly healed, but I still despised him.  What he’d done to me was bad enough, I found it more abhorrent that he would completely deny who he was and use someone else as shamelessly as he’d used me.  Unless he’d been lying the entire time, he had no feelings for women, he never had, and he was just going to marry some girl as a front for his own sexuality?  

My irritation must have showed, because Zion grimaced.  “Sorry, that’s probably a sore subject.”

I sighed.  “Yes, but not really for the reasons you’d expect.  In short, Wolf turned out to be a selfish ass.”  I hesitated before deciding to continue my explanation in the same uncomfortable summary.  “I…  The NCR won the dam.  With my help, and Wolf’s.  And, as thanks, they tried to hunt me down.  I’m not really sure if they wanted to kill me or lock me in prison and I’m not sure which would be worse.”

“For being from an Enclave family?” Zion guessed, and I nodded.  

“Yeah.  I was actually with…  My father’s old squad is sort of my family.  Was.  Most of them died at the dam.  I met up with their pilot, and the two of us stuck together with the NCR and the Brotherhood after us, as usual, and…and then I was alone, and honestly I… I just thought of you.”  His eyes widened slightly, but the way I’d worded that made me uncomfortable, so I studied the weave of the blankets and rambled, “I was at Creede, hiding from the Brotherhood, and the NCR, when… when I was alone.  You’d mentioned heading out to Walden Pond, so I followed old world roads and found my way out here, and Geiger led me to Fox, and Preston, and I helped them get to Diamond City, and now I’m here.”  He watched me in silence.  “…that’s… basically everything.”

Zion hugged me with painful force, and that was saying something as I’d often been hugged by people wearing power armor.  He buried his face in my neck.  “I love you.”

Well, that caught me a little off-guard.  But thinking about it, I already knew my answer.  “I love you too.”

Declarations of love concluded, sleep finally caught up with us.  

*       *       *

For five days we lived very crowded but peaceful lives.  Arcade didn’t leave the house in the hope that no one would realize he was still here.  Vulpes, MacCready, and I took turns hunting and taking merc jobs to keep everyone fed.  Hancock dropped by sometimes, just to visit.  I guess he’d sobered up a little and with Abraham insane, I was one of the few people he felt really close to.  Even Vulpes relaxed slightly around the other guys to the point that in five days, we felt like a family.  Going from just myself and two kids, the experience felt new and strange and I’m sure Vulpes felt the same.  Arcade seemed like this reminded him of a family he used to have, perhaps his father’s old squad or some other family he’d had before I met him.  MacCready was the only one who seemed right at home in all the bustle and chatter of seven people in a house.  He’d told me about his life as a kid and how much it bothered him living alone in all the years since then.  I know Duncan was always there in his thoughts, but I’d never seen him smiling so often before.  

There was that trace of sadness in his eyes when he looked at me, but he was alright.  I think having a real family again got him through it.  He was never alone unless he wanted to be and he always had something to do to distract himself, if he needed to, whether that was watching the kids or peeling potatos for dinner.  I don’t know what would have happened if he’d gone off on his own after I’d recovered.  I tried not to think about it.  I knew he would survive for Duncan, if he could, he was a good man like that, but I didn’t want to imagine the emotional toll he would have taken.  

We didn’t have any trouble with the Brotherhood after we moved the armor.  We still saw vertibirds in the area, harassing the mutants and the ghouls, but they avoided Goodneighbor.  They must have believed the story that Arcade had left.  

Geiger had settled just outside of Goodneighbor with a pack of three other deathclaws, including one mature adult female.  Dubbed Ginger by Hancock due to her slight reddish tint, she seemed slightly smarter than the standard deathclaw as well, which was probably how she had survived to such an age.  It occurred to me that less intelligent deathclaws getting killed might be breeding the species towards higher intellect, but for now it just meant that this female and Geiger could convince the others not to eat friendly humans and to defend the town.  I went to Geiger and communicated with him as best as I could.  It turned out that he’d reasoned that humans could help deathclaws if they got hurt.  I’d suspected for a long time that he’d thought of me as his “alpha” since I’d saved him and counted all my close friends as members of his pack.  Now he had his own pack, but still had enough brains (or lacked enough aggression) to understand that humans could do things deathclaws couldn’t.  He’d managed to convince the female that humans could at least “kill fire.”  I told Hancock about a deathclaw’s natural fear of flares and convinced him to let them stay as long as they didn’t attack the townspeople.  

Nearly a week after the fight with the Brotherhood patrol, it was MacCready’s turn to buy supplies.  We bought from Daisy unless we needed weapons, so it was usually MacCready who took the grocery trips on the off-chance that Daisy had word from the Capitol.  I cooked the last of our meat for lunch while we waited for him to get back.  Vulpes had gotten Arcade started on economic policies again and seemed genuinely interested in his opinions.  Jay and Fox sat beside each other, debating whether or not Hercules could beat Gandalf in a fight.  Israel was on the bench, looking out the window with his binoculars, as usual.  

Israel’s voice rang out above the rest while I nearly burned myself on the frying pan.  “Daddy?”

Somehow I got the meat onto a plate and set the pan down.  “What is it?”  

“MacCready just left the town.”  I guessed why before everyone else voiced their shock. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm really enjoying writing these children, though. XD


	21. Plague Dogs

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The chapter title has many meanings.   
> Also, I'm still pushing to get this finished and it might (hopefully) be done by the end of the year, or even by Christmas. I had a cold this week, which meant I spent most of my time writing this when I wasn't sleeping, and with the holidays, I'll probably be writing pretty often as I'm away from work.   
> Also, due to the timing of various events, I might break the next few chapters into several smaller chapters rather than having them be this long.

Arcade, Fox, and Jay all yelled some variation of “What?!” or “Why?” and their emotions ranged from concerned to panicked, respectively.  Vulpes, the calmest of all, waited for silence before asking, “Can you see where he’s going?”

“He’s headed south, isn’t he?”

I felt eight eyes on my back as Israel checked.  “Yup.  Why’s he going that way?”

I turned off the burners and dished the kids their dinner, considering how best to act, though I knew I had to hurry.  

“Zion?”  It was Vulpes who’d asked.  I’d told him and RJ my real name.  We were a family now, all of us, and I could trust them with more than my life.  In origin, the tradition may have been archaic.  I don’t know if it had existed in my tribe before the war or if Russel had just made it up more recently.  For a long time, I kept my first name secret just because I’d been told to do so as a child; in the Legion, I’d kept it to myself because Vulpes had his own name for me, although I disliked it.  Since I’d crossed the country, my name had served a different purpose.  If I found someone my kids could trust, I would tell them.  That was what I decided on the way.  I’d planned to tell several people: Abraham, Hancock, Preston… and then Sanctuary had happened.  I’d told my kids a long time ago that if someone knew my real name, they could trust them, but I hadn’t told anyone for a long, long time.  Sanctuary had shaken my trust.  I’d trusted MacCready with my life, and with my kids, but there remained had that trace of doubt.  Now that trace had finally dissipated.  

RJ had no reason to leave, save one.  I had always known the one thing that came before me and my kids for him.  “He’s gone south,” I explained, “to the Capitol.”

Vulpes looked puzzled and Arcade repeated, “Why?”

“He…”  I didn’t know how much he had told them and I didn’t want to announce the truth in front of my kids.  I shut off the stove and made my decision.  “I’m not certain, I need to check with Daisy, but my guess is RJ received news from back home, his home, and he needs to go there now.”  I made the urgency clear with my tone and hoped the reason for my vague wording would be obvious.  

Jay sniffled, “What kind of news?”

“Grown-up stuff.”  I hugged her and kissed the top of her head, feeling the rising concern as both Vulpes and Arcade read that as a good-bye.  They started to stand simultaneously and exchanged a stare.  Arcade won the visual duel and stepped towards the hallway, waiting in the universal gesture of, “tell me what’s going on where the kids won’t hear.”  

I stepped towards Fox and the boy questioned me in quiet worry.  “There are dangerous things to the south…”

“And MacCready’s a very competent fighter.  He’ll be fine.”  I hugged and kissed him in turn and the minute he was freed, Fox squinted at his other father, trying to pierce the facade of calm and determine if he should really believe me.  

“MacCready is an excellent combatant,” Vulpes reassured him, despite having never seen the man fight, “He will be perfectly safe.”  Fox seemed a little more at ease.  

I hugged and kissed Israel before he spoke.  He tended to be the most astute of the kids, at least when it came to reading me.  He whispered so his siblings wouldn’t hear, “Are you going to be okay out there?”

I kissed him again.  “I’ll be fine, you be safe.  Listen to Vulpes, and keep an eye on things around here.”  He still looked nervous.  

Jay piped up, “Israel got _two_ kisses!”

“You can get a second kiss, too.”  I kissed her again and ruffled her wild hair.  Fox squirmed away when I turned to him.  I was worried.  I was terribly worried, and I knew we had to get going fast, but MacCready would push himself to his limits and we’d be tracking him at a distance even if we had left at the same time.  

Looking back across the table, I found Vulpes carefully expressionless but clearly concerned.  He sat too still to be calm, he was on edge.  Arcade hid it less well.  He had a set to his jaw that told me he knew what I was about to suggest, the only course of action either of us could rectify with our emotions.  My kids were safe.  Even if Arcade didn’t realize MacCready’s son was deathly ill, he knew the sniper risked his life running off like that.  We had to go after him.  He also looked more like a soldier than I’d ever seen from him.  

I walked over to Arcade and we spoke quietly.  

“I’m going to check with Daisy, but I think I know that happened.  MacCready’s son is sick, maybe dying.  He only came up here to save his life with that cure you got.  I don’t know how much of this he told you, but you should know his reasons.  If he’s going to the Capitol, I’m going after him—”

“I’m coming with you—”

“I planned on it.  Vulpes will watch the kids, he can handle them, and someone needs to.  You should get your power armor, Enclave or not, you’re safer wearing that.”

He hesitated and then sighed, “Fair enough.”

I called Vulpes over and relayed the plan.  He accepted without question.  In ten minutes, I’d confirmed my suspicions and we were on the road.  MacCready was already long gone.  We picked up Geiger to track him.  The four deathclaws had built quite the lair outside Goodneighbor.  I saw all four in a glance, all prowling around a particularly sturdy ruin.  I couldn’t see and didn’t seek it out, but I could guess there was a nest in there.  If Geiger could keep them all in line, Goodneighbor would quickly become the safest town in the Commonwealth, if not on the entire East Coast.  Hopefully Ginger could keep them under control while we were gone.  

Chasing MacCready with Geiger at our side, I think we both remembered the Mojave.  It brought to mind my time traveling with Vulpes and I’m sure Arcade felt even more reminded of his time with Wolf.  I’d given up on true pacifism, but tracking a friend made a pleasant change from hunting down enemies and animals.  

My keen senses let us avoid almost everything, and Geiger’s presence deterred the rest.  Despite his haste, MacCready got lucky; he found a caravan either because he’d been told about it or by chance and he traveled south with them.  He’d made such time before he’d reached them, however, that I doubted we’d catch up until he reached the Capitol.  We made good time as well, and we were gaining on him once he reached the caravan.  Every night we stopped to rest and so did he, by that point, but he’d traveled without stopping when he’d been alone.  I understood his haste, it was just reckless.  He wouldn’t be helping anyone if he died on the way, and exhaustion caused mistakes.  

Despite the urgency, Arcade and I enjoyed the trip more than we wanted to.  Our unconventional family was wonderful, just crowded, and it was nice to be on our own for a few days.  Most nights we stayed in ruined buildings and Geiger kept watch.  We stopped to rest somewhere in Pennsylvania, a town with old architecture and a glass and steel star flickering on a hill to the south.  Arcade made a joke about it, some literary reference I didn’t get, but figured it just referred to the age-old trope of following stars to a destination.  Derived from the nautical use of Polaris, no doubt.  He realized I didn’t know the reference, for once, and changed the subject.  

“You, know, I’ve been wondering for a while, did you name Israel after me or my father?”

“Both,” I explained, prying open the door to a sturdy but abandoned building, “My first thought was to name him after you, but the way you speak of your father, I trust that he also deserved the honor.  The world lost him too soon.”

He looked somber and nodded pensively.  Once I got the door open we both did a sweep of the house, but it was as empty as we expected.  The whole town was deserted, presumably for the same reason that Geiger had perked up when we arrived.  I didn’t expect to find any deathclaws that could match him, and any fight would rouse myself and Arcade, who could step in if things got dire.  And the house even had a decently clean and intact bed large enough for both of us.  Arcade spoke again as we settled down to sleep with Geiger stretched out at the door, beside Arcade’s armor.  

“Why `Jay’?  I mean, I understand your other names, but was Jay named after blue jays?”

The question caught me so off-guard that I laughed.  “Not remotely.”  I stretched and explained, “Jay’s a nickname.  I named her Jane.  Fox couldn’t pronounce the `n’ for a long time, and the nickname stuck.  I feel like Jay fits her better, I named her after the character in Pride and Prejudice.”

“I should have expected a literary reference from you.”  He chuckled, “You know, I still have the book you gave me.”  He dug it out of his bag, an old, badly worn copy he must have read a hundred times.  

The smile I’d had for most of the day grew a bit wider.  “I’m not sure if that’s because I gave it to you, or if you just have a serious passion for Jane Austen.”

He grinned as well, that rare playful grin I’d seen more often in the past week.  “What do you think?”

*       *       *

Watching my children became infinitely more stressful when I had to leave them unattended.  Walking to Daisy for supplies, I felt uncannily reminded of half a dozen life-or-death missions where any number of problems could have ended the war before I returned to camp.  But we had to eat.  I found myself counting the wasted seconds as Daisy counted the caps.  In the back of my mind, I was contemplating her murder, not that I would ever act on that.  Unless she took another ten seconds.  I gathered my purchase into the leather rucksack I’d had for ten years, now demoted from carrying the tools of a spymaster across the Mojave to hauling groceries less than a mile.  An unexpected air of tension caught my notice.  

I’d been so focused on returning to the kids, that I’d scarcely looked around.  A dog had wandered into Goodneighbor.  It was watched by a man holding a knife, no doubt hoping for a canine feast, but he backed off when the dog looked his way.  Lone dogs were not unusual, but lone dogs could not open the door to this town.  Daisy and the other less-strung-out residents either realized this or recognized that this animal was not harmless.  They watched the dog sniff its way over the brick, a canine on a mission.  A trader caught in conversation with a now silent and wary guard, turned to see the dog.  She tracked over the pavement, oblivious to him or else ignoring him.  I watched the man stoop and reach to pet her.  

“Hey, girl…”  He trailed off as she looked up.  What he saw in her eyes, I could not determine, but I could guess.  Whoever she was, the canine did not notice me, or else did not acknowledge my presence.  The trader scrambled backwards, blubbering in horror with the sort of terror I loved to evoke.  The dog returned her nose to the ground and tracked up the street.  I could already guess where I would find her.  I followed quickly, stepping over the incoherent man as if he were just another junky in my way.  

I found the dog in the alley, at Zion’s door.  The path dead-ended at Bobbi’s place, just beyond our home, and it was narrow, leaving the foreign skinwalker trapped.  I slid the strap of the bag higher onto my shoulder, in case I would need to use the silver knife I always carried.  At least I could thank that ranger for something.  

The dog curled her tail between her legs and backed against the door.  

“Why are you here?”  I didn’t care if I was overheard, this town had enough addicts that no one assumed conversation had a second party.  A dog was at least a living thing.  

She didn’t move.  I guess it took her a moment of my unrelenting stare to realize that I knew what she was.  “I’m looking for someone.”

“Who?”

I approached her until I could speak more softly, and she had no choice but to allow my advance.  I stopped beside the door, my canine visitor pressed against the opposite corner of the alley, cowering from me.  She hesitated to answer.  

“Is it Zion?”

Hearing the name, she stood straighter.  Fear gave way to curiosity and surprise and her tail even wagged a little.  “You know Zion?”

I nodded, impatient again.  I wanted to get back to the children, lest they start fighting or otherwise cause trouble, but I wouldn’t leave an unknown quantity so close by.  “Why?”

She hesitated.  After a moment, I glared and she admitted, “He’s my half-brother.  Please, you must know him, have him talk to me, please!”  

I could hear her voice crack, and her near-human eyes watered.  Her canine face somehow conveyed the expression of her desperation.  “He is not here today.”

She choked and for the barest second it seemed she’d break down, but then she forced herself to hide it.  Admirable.  “Please, I grew up with him, you have to believe me.  I came all the way out here to find him, I’ve got no where else to go!”

Had I been alone, I would have welcomed her without hesitation, confident of my ability to defend myself.  As it was, I thought quickly.  “You can stay.  Zion will not be back for many days.  Until he can vouch for you, you will follow my instructions to the letter.  You will not come upstairs under any circumstances, do I make myself clear?”

She nodded vigorously, tears streaming down her face, this time in joy.  “Thank you, thank you so much!”

I could lock the door to the stairwell easily, and I could move my bedroll into the kitchen, keeping her away from the kids.  My instincts told me this woman was sincere, but I couldn’t risk trusting her.  Zion would return soon enough, and he could confirm her story.  

I let her inside, locked the door behind her, and set up my precautions to keep her in the first floor.  I warned the kids that we had a guest and was met with more fear than curiosity.  I didn’t worry that they’d investigate her on their own after their experience with Abraham.  When I brought our guest her dinner, I found her curled in a corner, fast asleep.  She had used neither bed nor blanket, nor returned to human form.  I set her food on the small table by the door and brought some other things from upstairs.  The fact that the woman hadn’t chosen to sleep on MacCready’s bed, or even on a blanket taken from that bed, concerned me.  I had hardly been welcoming, I admit, but the decision to sleep curled up on the floor made me wonder if she might have been a slave.  She’d feared me, perhaps more than she should have.  Was she another remnant of the Legion?  

I found her awake when I returned downstairs.  She sat on the floor, clearly starving, and staring at the food, but afraid to eat.  When I opened the stairwell door, she retreated to her corner.  “I’m sorry, I was just looking…”

“You don’t need to fear me.  Not for this.  You are welcome to the first floor, and to what I give you.  Don’t come upstairs, and we need not be enemies.”  I handed her a bundle of fabric.  “My name is Vulpes Inculta.”

She trembled at my name as she took the bundle with her paws.  “Of the Legion.”

“Yes.  Were you also…?”

She shook her head, still more canine than human in form.  “No.  Nearly.  Zion… he saved me.  They took him instead.”  She shook her head again and opened the bundle, folding back the blanket that wrapped it as if I would smack her for the slightest crease.  I had seen Legion slaves as dull and pathetic for so long, but either this woman was different or I had never watched them as closely.  She was so afraid, and so meek, but beneath that, there was a certain spirit, a certain dignity not unlike Zion’s when I had first met him.  Whatever she had been through outside the Legion had beaten her down, trained her to act this way, but she had not broken.  

She found the clothes within the blanket, most of it had been cleared from pre-war dressers when Zion made the house livable again, but there was also a dress.  I’d found it years ago, back before the flood.  I’d meant to give it to Zion, but that had never happened and I’d kept it ever since as a memory of those times.  Holding onto it like that was pointless; it didn’t serve any purpose, and this woman needed clothing unless she would remain a dog until Zion returned.  The dress was beautiful: red silk with gold embroidery.  

She picked up the shimmering fabric and studied my expression.  “Wh-what is this?”

“Clothes,” I replied simply, though I figured she knew that.  “I don’t have a wide selection, but you can wear that, if you want to become human again.  The food over there is for you, I recommend eating slowly if you haven’t eaten in a while.” I turned back to the door and added, “What is your name, if you don’t mind my asking?”

For a moment, I didn’t expect her to answer.  “Liberty.”

“Liberty,” I repeated, running the name over my tongue.  Zion and Liberty, very idealistic name choice.  “You can sleep on the blanket or the bed, whichever you prefer.”  I shut and locked the door behind me and went back upstairs.  Hopefully I wouldn’t need to leave the house between now and when Zion returned.  Although I really found myself inclined to trust Liberty even without his approval.  Not that I was going to risk our children on that belief.  

*       *       *

I opened my eyes sometime before dawn.  I could tell from his breathing that Arcade was asleep beneath me.  Looking around, I saw Geiger’s glow by the door.  He stood, facing the broken window, looking at a figure I couldn’t make out in the darkness.  There must be clouds tonight because there was no glow from the moon or stars.  The dim shine of radiation was almost nonexistent here except for Geiger.  I felt someone watching me, but there was no question or introduction.  I nudged Arcade’s side until he woke up.  

He groaned, breaking the silence and I felt his voice inside my chest as if it was my own.  “What is it?”

“There’s someone here.”  I whispered into his ear and hoped I wouldn’t be heard by anyone else.  

Instantly, groggy annoyance gave way to concern and I felt him scrambling for his glasses and his plasma defender.  I didn’t move.  Maybe they couldn’t see me clearly and I had only assumed they knew where I was?  I struggled to pick out a face in the darkness.  

“Calm down.”

The voice wasn’t familiar.  I remained frozen in place as Arcade propped himself onto his elbows and tried to look intimidating with his hair askew while he was naked in bed and underneath another naked man and a faded prewar quilt.  He cocked his plasma defender.  “Who are you?!”

“I’m a friend,” the voice replied, decidedly more commanding than friendly.  Hydraulics and metal gave away power armor I couldn’t see as she approached the door and backed off at a growl from Geiger.  When we remained silent and suspicious, she announced, “I’m Captain Regina Baines, formerly of Adam’s Air Force Base, now of Bethlehem.  State your rank.”

Arcade blinked, dumbfounded.  “Uh… the armor was my father’s, who was a Major, but I was never a soldier myself.”  He didn’t let go of his gun and I still didn’t move.  This could easily be a trap, and even if it wasn’t, why would this person approach us?  

The Captain nodded, I could see her silhouette as the clouds parted.  “But you are Enclave, at least.  What base?  Even outside the Enclave, you’ve surely seen combat.”

“Well, yeah, it’s the wasteland.  Things are dangerous and miserable most of the time.”  He looked at me pointedly as he said that and I smiled.  Most of the time, but not always.  Inside the house, I doubted the Captain could see us.  “I’m from Navarro.”

She paused thoughtfully and I saw Geiger turn his head for a second, watching at least one other visitor.  “Do you have leadership experience?”

I moved slightly and Arcade waited, expecting me to say something.  When I didn’t, he answered, “Look, captain, what exactly are you looking for here?  I was Enclave.  That was a long time ago.  Right now, I have a deathclaw and energy weapons.  And it’s late.  What do you want?”

She hesitated again and a second voice spoke up, also a woman.  “Captain, still no sign of the Brotherhood in the area.”

Regina paused yet again.  “It isn’t like them to draw back.  We’re missing something.”

“They went to war,” I explained, startling both women.  Two power armored helmets stared into the darkness and I imagined the judging scowls whether or not they were real.  I scowled back.  “The Brotherhood went north, to fight the Institute, among other things.  Stretched themselves pretty thin, if you ask me.”

“And that’s why you’re heading south?”

I hadn’t expected the question, but I shrugged.  “The Elder’s up north, I think, there isn’t really any point to attack down here.  And we’re not running away.”

I hugged Arcade when I said that and he wrapped one arm around me in response.  The silence stretched on.  Finally, Captain Baines turned away from us.  “There aren’t many of us left, you know.  Be careful.”

Something about that struck a cord with Arcade and he called after her.  “Sorry.  Look, the Commonwealth is swarming with Brotherhood, but we’re going back up there eventually.”  

It was an invitation and I raised an eyebrow on the off-chance he could see it.  He added under his breath, “The Commonwealth’s a big place.”

Regina nodded.  “We might just meet you up there.”  

I didn’t relax until Geiger lay back down.  Somehow I got back to sleep that night.  

~       ~       ~

Heading south, we followed the trail of the caravan until it split off from MacCready.  We were near the Capitol by then, we’d passed raiders and farms, and all in all more life than we’d seen in a while.  We had no idea which farm was RJ’s and nothing even suggested his presence until Geiger suddenly sped up.  I spotted MacCready nearly six hundred feet ahead of us and broke into a jog to catch him.  Power armor didn’t jog well, at least not Arcade’s armor even since he’d repaired it, so he trailed behind, knowing we’d stop eventually.  

“RJ!”

He glanced back, not slowing down.  “You followed me?”

Half dragging my bad leg, I somehow caught up with him.  “I couldn’t let you run off alone.  I brought Arcade.”

“And Geiger,” MacCready noted, looking back.  “You really didn’t have to do this.”

I sighed.  “I know you feel like you owe me, but don’t.  We’re family, or as close to family as most people have in the wasteland.  If you have to, think of it this way: I could never have kept my kids alive without your help.  And this is your son.  Whatever happens…”

“Yeah…”  He frowned and I didn’t complete my sentence.  He didn’t say anything and I couldn’t think of any way to lighten the mood.  Eventually, our pace slowed and we turned up an overgrown dirt road.  Arcade was only fifty feet back, at this point, downhill from us with Geiger, who’d run off to hunt and returned licking bloody claws.  Cresting the hill, I saw a pre-war farm, refurbished and bedecked with strings of lights that had gone out.  

A man in a rumpled top hat stood by the door and waved when he recognized MacCready.  RJ broke into a run and I stumbled after him until we could both see the face of the person greeting us.  

MacCready spoke before we were quite close enough.  “Eclair, how’s…”  His face fell, seeing the other man shake his head and RJ rushed into the house past him.  Running had tweaked my leg and I settled into a panting limp while I tried to make it stop hurting.  Eclair looked me over and I studied him in return.  Aside from Lanius, he was the tallest person I’d ever seen.  He towered over me, and he was built like a bear.  Not the impressive, terrifying sort of bear, but rather the pudgy, lumbering kind.  He wasn’t obese, no one was, but this man clearly ate well.  He wasn’t a fighter, even if he hadn’t been missing one eye and even if his stance didn’t suggest he had some sort of injury to his right foot.  

The shape of his face suggested he smiled a lot, but right now he looked like a pallbearer.  The black suit didn’t help.  He spent a few minutes staring at the Vexillarius hood I’d worn down here.  Arcade had gotten more comfortable with it in recent days, but to those who’d never seen the Legion, it made an odd statement.  

“Hi.”

Eclair blinked at me curiously.  “Hi.  You’re with RJ?”

“Depends what you mean by with.”  He stopped suddenly, staring towards the road as Arcade and Geiger came into view.  “Holy shit!”  Eclair reached for a gun and I grabbed his hand.  

“They’re with us.”

Eclair stared again, reevaluating me.  “Always could trust MacCready to find new and more dangerous `friends’…”  He spoke under his breath and then shrugged before following RJ inside.  I glanced back at Arcade and joined the natives.  

The farmhouse was small with high ceilings; it looked like a converted barn.  A dark hallway led through the center of the barn and what looked like animal stalls now served as rooms.  RJ and Eclair crammed into a stiflingly warm nook around a child’s bed to my right.  Aside from a lantern, a chair and a table, there was no furniture there and barely enough room to walk.  A tiny kitchen, three chairs and a table took up the opposite corner with most of the chairs stacked with partly-ruined cookbooks.  I presumed that the middle right of the six stalls held an inactive generator and the furnace that made Duncan’s alcove so warm.  I guessed the other three stalls were a bathroom, a bedroom, and maybe some kind of storage, but didn’t go looking.  Instead I leaned against the wall between the bed and the generator and looked on from the most out-of-the-way spot I could think of.  

Duncan was tiny.  RJ never stated his exact age, he’d told me he was a bit younger than my kids and I’d expected a five-year-old.  He was four, at the oldest.  Either he was very small for his age or he’d been sick so long it had stunted his growth.  Not for the first time, I wondered if the pathogen inside me might be able to save him, but even if we’d arrived sooner, he would have been too weak to survive the change.  The boy lay on the tiny bed, under a hand-woven yellow and blue blanket.  I could only see his face and hands over the blanket, but they were covered in blue boils.  His skin had a blueish tint as well, and he looked dead even if I hadn’t noticed that he wasn’t moving at all.  He had his father’s dark hair and seeing him, I found myself picturing Raven.  

I wanted to leave.  I wanted to run away and just pretend this wasn’t happening, and it wasn’t just because this was Duncan, it was because of the memories and worries his death brought to mind.  As it was, I looked anywhere but the corpse.  That was also a mistake.  MacCready stared at Duncan, tears running down his face, absolutely devastated.  He hadn’t bothered to use the chair, he’d just knelt beside the bed.  He looked like his legs had simply stopped working.  I sensed Eclair beside me, tears already spent, now he was just awkwardly waiting and trying to look miserable.  People didn’t stay sad forever, even if he’d be upset again later, the emotion had run dry for now.  That wouldn’t happen any time soon for MacCready.  

*       *       *

Hearing silence, I stepped into the barn as saw why.  Oh, no.  

MacCready was beside himself, unsurprisingly, but Zion was also dead to the world.  He stared blankly at some point between MacCready and his son, and he didn’t react when I took his hand in an effort to snap him out of it.  I figured it reminded him of the children he’d lost, or else it just bothered him more deeply than the rest of us.  Depressing as it was, I’d seen a lot of dead kids in my life.  

Only Eclair noticed me enter, although I didn’t know his name at the time.  When he briefly met my gaze, I asked softly, “When did it happen?”  Maybe I could use his body to cure the disease he had, so this would never happen again.  At least that way his death might seem a little less pointless.  

Eclair frowned at me, carefully looking me over.  “Yesterday morning.”

My brow creased and I looked from him to the body.  There was no way.  This room felt like a sauna, it would have accelerated decomposition, and yet he looked almost alive.  “That’s impossible.”

Eclair shrugged.  “I don’t know, I thought it was weird too, but so’s whatever he has.”  

I shook my head but didn’t explain in case I was wrong.  I got my medical kit out of my bag and tried to step past Eclair, but he barred my way.  I actually wasn’t wearing my lab coat and for once that turned out to be a problem.  Eclair started to voice his protest in what sounded like a threat, but MacCready snapped out of his daze and stopped him.  “Let him through, he’s a doctor.”  He sounded half drunk with emotion.  

Eclair stepped aside and I knelt beside MacCready, who backed up to give me room.  I guess Eclair just wasn’t going to question things, but MacCready asked quietly, “So, can… can you bring him back?”

I kept my face set in a frown and didn’t answer as I took out my stethoscope and listened to his chest.  MacCready kept talking.  “I mean, you practically brought Zi— Coyote back from the dead, and he really seems to think you can do anything.  Not that I believe _that_ , it’s just.  I’ll take anything I can get right now.  Please.  Please, just… do whatever you can.”

“Shh.”  I frowned deeper, struggling to hear.  Silenced, MacCready stared at me blankly.  

The quiet stretched on with only the wind howling outside to drown out what I was trying to hear.  I felt everyone’s eyes on me whether or not Zion was aware of what was happening.  

“He’s not dead.”

RJ broke into a smile and tears ran down his face again.  “He isn’t?”  He looked about to hug me and I think my worried stare was all that stopped him.  

“He’s alive, but he’s in a coma.  This isn’t the disease I thought it was, it may be a different strain or the cure we got just won’t help him.  These boils,” I pointed at some, “It sounds like they’re in his lungs, and he’s very weak.  Even if he wasn’t, this still isn’t good.  I might be able to cure him, but that’s a very long shot—”

“Please!  Try anything you can!  Just help him, I’ll get you anything you need!”  He was desperate.  Even now he was practically crying.  

“RJ,” I tried to level with him, “he’s _very_ weak.  I’ll do whatever I can, but there’s a very real chance it won’t be enough, and as it is, I don’t really have the equipment to synthesize—”

“What do you need?”

I gave him a list, just what I could think of as a start, and MacCready rushed off to get that before I could stop him.  He insisted that I stay and do what I could, but that wasn’t much.  The boy was alive, but only barely.  I examined him more carefully but didn’t learn anything I hadn’t known already.  I needed to analyze the disease, determine if it was viral or bacterial or something else, at the very least, and I couldn’t do that without a microscope.  

Once RJ left, Eclair shrugged and walked over to cook dinner.  Apparently that involved a lot of swearing.  At some point, I realized Zion had come back to reality.  Tears streaked his face, but he was watching me work with a slightly more hopeful stare.  He frowned thoughtfully, “Is this the Black Death?”  He spoke quietly so Eclair probably didn’t hear him.  

I was surprised he’d even heard of that.  I shrugged.  “Maybe.  At first, I thought it was something else, something worse, but this might well be Plague.  Normally, the buboes wouldn’t be quite this prevalent over his body, but the disease could have mutated.”

He frowned again, this time in concern.  “If it is the plague, then you said you heard it in his lungs, so it’s extremely contagious, isn’t it?”

“Did you read a medical text or something?”

He nodded.  “A few.  I don’t remember much, but that stuck in my mind.”  

“Yeah.”  I looked around for something that might work to cover his mouth but still allow him to breathe.  I didn’t see anything.  “Just avoid any possibly infected rats or cloth you see, okay?  He isn’t coughing so we should be a little safer than if he was.  The good news is I’m very good at synthesizing antibiotics, which might actually cure him if that’s what he has.”

Zion stifled a chuckle and I realized he probably guessed the reason.  Kneeling beside the lantern, he couldn’t miss my blush.  I hastily returned the focus to Duncan, just rambling in an effort to change the subject.  “He probably came in contact with an infected flea or animal, and he just went untreated until the bacteria spread to his lungs and maybe his blood.  I should be able to clear out the bacteria, but the damage it did might still kill him.  Assuming this is the Black Death; it might not be.”  

Zion stood and walked over to sit behind me, in the chair I also hadn’t bothered to use.  He murmured in my ear and made me blush again.  “Saving lives by virtue of your sex life, just another reason I love you.”  On a more serious note, he added, “I wasn’t kidding when I said I never get sick.  Aside from pregnancy and injury, I have never been ill.  I might well be immune, if the risk of infection becomes a problem.”  He glanced at Eclair and the chef seemed to be doing just fine.  Zion stood and raised his voice.  “At any rate, I can hunt down any rats that might have caused this, just in case.”

I expected him to do that normally, but, without any warning, the man I’d crossed the country to be with became a dog and slunk outside, sniffing the floor.  Eclair had his back turned the whole time.  I mean, I’d sort of guessed that Zion’s healing ability was the same engineered pathogen that let his tribe become canine, but I’d never really thought about the fact that he could shape-shift.  Healing suggested that both abilities involved cell regeneration, so I could rationalize it, and he clearly had a human mind, it just… it wasn’t every day that one realized one’s boyfriend could literally become a dog.  

MacCready arrived a few minutes later and found me staring towards the door, still thinking that over.  

“What?”

I snapped out of my daze.  “Huh?”

“You’re just daydreaming, at a time like this?”

“Well, I can’t exactly get to work until I know what I’m dealing with, and I can only test for that with the supplies—”

“Here.”  Cutting to the chase, MacCready laid out nearly a dozen different medical instruments in various states of repair.  The microscope, luckily, was pristine.  

“Where did you get all these?” I asked, setting up the microscope and grabbing a needle to take a sample of the fluid in one of the boils.  They did match the locations of his lymph nodes, even if many weren’t normal spots for visible infection from the plague.  That was my main guess right now, despite the amount of buboes and the slight difference in color.  

MacCready explained, “I ran to Megaton, the doctor there’s been helping us out from the start.  He let me borrow these when I told him what was happening.”  

“Good.”  I got the sample on a slide and started to check it.  “This should help a lot.  Not to ask for even more, but if you’ve got any very breathable fabric, or better yet if you happen to have a gas mask, that would be great.”  

“Why?”

Zion returned, in human form, again, and having apparently just washed his hands.  “No rats, just wild dogs,” he noted, “It might be best to wait until morning to deal with them, if you’re right.”

RJ frowned at him, “Right about what?”

“You suggested it,” I corrected Zion, “and we _are_ right, this is _Yersinia_ _pestis_.”  I gestured to the slide I was looking at and then turned towards the sniper, “MacCready, Duncan has a disease called the Black Plague, it’s caused by a bacteria and carried by fleas, hence looking for rats or dogs.”

MacCready gestured for more.  “And?  Is that a _good_ thing?”

Leaning back from the sample, I sighed, “It means this can be treated easily.  I just need to synthesize some antibiotics.  The problem is, the plague still had a high mortality rate, especially when it progressed this far.  Most _adults_ wouldn’t survive if it reached the lungs and got this bad.  And he’s been sick for a while, he’s very weak.  I’ll do what I can, but at this point…”

“Are you saying we should _give up_?”

“Not at all,” I countered, already setting up the equipment I’d need to synthesize the medicine, “I just want you to understand that this is a _very_ slim chance.  Don’t expect this to be a miracle.”

“Yeah.”  He watched me work for a long moment and then stepped outside.  Zion followed him.  

*       *       *

RJ walked into the night until he stood a good distance from the house and lit up a cigarette.  I managed not to cough as I came up beside him.  

“You know,” he explained, “I’ve been terrified of this since he first got sick.  And then I thought it had already happened.  Hell, all the way down here, I expected to walk in and find him… it’d already be too late.  And I thought it _was_ when I did get here, but…  But now, he’s alive, and… and I don’t know if I’m relieved because somehow he hasn’t died and maybe he’ll still make it, or if this is ever worse because he’s still sick, and he might still die, and maybe he’s still suffering, you know?”

I looked off at the city in the distance and nodded.  “I can’t imagine having a child that sick.  I mean, when I lost Raven…  There was no warning, no worry at the time, it was just… the blink of an eye, and my baby was gone.  In some ways, it might be better to know that it’s coming.  You can prepare for it.  It still hits you like a crashing vertibird, but at least you see it coming.”  

He thought about it and then nodded.  “I thought you said you had it happen?  Where you knew a kid would die before they did.”

I bobbled my head.  “Sort of.  I expected at least one child would die at birth, and they did, but it wasn’t a child I’d raised, even for five years.  It was my baby, but not one that I really knew.  This is very different.”

I guess it was because we were alone, and this was me, but MacCready wrapped one arm around my shoulders in that gesture like he wanted to say he was there for me.  I did the same, pulling him into an awkward sort of huddle while we stood in the cold, listening to the howling wind.  

MacCready broke down.  He didn’t say anything more and he didn’t need to.  I felt tears streaming from my own eyes as I held him and I’m sure we both prayed that no one else could hear.  This was our nightmare.  I’d lost Raven, and the unnamed infants who had died at birth, but I still had Israel, Fox, and Jay, even if I didn’t count Arcade, Vulpes, and RJ.  MacCready had us as well, but in terms of family… he’d already lost his wife.  Brutally.  Duncan might be all he had left.  I didn’t want to see him share the same pain I’d felt.  

We stayed outside until the cold made us shiver.  Returning to the heated farmhouse, we found Eclair had served soup, a recipe that managed to taste better than my own cooking, and it was warmer than the ambient, excessively hot air.  Arcade had stopped to eat while vials spun in a machine I didn’t recognize and we joined him.  Eclair caught RJ up on various local events and explained some of their past.  Apparently, they’d grown up together in that town of children where MacCready had been mayor.  I found I liked Eclair, he seemed like a genuinely happy person, despite his complaints about the weather, and the farming, and the Brotherhood all over the area.  The rest of us heartily agreed on that last point.  

“You could come North with us, once Duncan gets better.”  I made the suggestion and Eclair looked shocked.  

“In case you hadn’t noticed, I’m not the most travel-capable guy.  Between my eye and my foot, you might as well carry me, and I won’t be much help in a fight.”

“We’ve got power armor and a deathclaw,” Arcade pointed out, “and between MacCready and Coyote, I’m sure we can handle anything that picks a fight.”  

“And we aren’t the fastest either,” I added, tapping the side of my knee.  

Eclair looked genuinely stunned.  “Uh… if you know a place I can stay, then… sure.”

The rest of the meal, we discussed the Commonwealth, and what it was like up there.  As soon as he was done eating, Arcade went back to Duncan’s side.  He did more work on the cure and jury-rigged some device to monitor the boy’s vital signs.  After dinner, MacCready dug around for a gas mask, but found nothing.  

“Why do you need one?” he asked Arcade, “You want the filters or something?”

“Not exactly,” Arcade continued to work while he answered, “If the bacteria’s in his lungs, Duncan’s contagious, and a gas mask might slow the spread, although at the moment we all might have been exposed.”  

RJ grimaced and nodded.  “I don’t have one, but I can get one tomorrow.  The city won’t let me in before dawn.”  

The next morning, he did as he’d promised.  RJ, needing to activity to keep his mind from worry, rushed to town before dawn and brought back a gas mask.  He spent the rest of the day hunting wild dogs and any other creature unfortunate enough to move in the vicinity of the farm.  At Arcade’s suggestion, I was the one to put the mask on Duncan.  It looked so big on the tiny child.  

Seeing him like this brought out a lot of emotions.  I thought of Raven, and the infants I’d never even known.  I felt so grateful that I still had Israel, Fox, and Jay.  Mostly, I was terrified that Duncan wouldn’t survive.  

Arcade worked through the night.  Twice that I saw, he had to stop what he was doing to help Duncan.  I don’t know what happened specifically, this was way beyond my meager knowledge of medicine, but the boy survived.  I think he’d been bleeding, but I didn’t see any blood.  Arcade had to hook up an IV and it scared me to think that the blood pac he used might be more than the amount of blood already in Duncan.  He was still so young…  

I did what I could to help, but that wasn’t much, so soon I was just sitting with my back against the footboard of the child’s bed.  I watched Arcade work and waited to assist anyone who asked.  Arcade didn’t sleep and I tried not to, but without anything to do, I admit I dozed off.  When he wasn’t cooking, Eclair tended the few crops still growing this late in winter.  We kept a grim vigil in this way, and when he ran out of other things to keep himself busy, MacCready joined us.  For two days, Arcade didn’t sleep and barely ate and the four of us sat around the small room, hoping for a miracle.  

On the third day, he finished the antibiotic and started treating Duncan with that and a mix of other drugs.  With the child still on the verge of death, Arcade refused to go to bed, but he did at least sit down on the floor beside me and stretch out.  His boots nearly touched the other wall.  Eclair dozed in a chair beside the table.  MacCready took over the chair Arcade had vacated and sat beside his son.  We were still in those positions when the third day stretched into the fourth and then the fifth.  Exhaustion had finally overcome his willpower and Arcade had fallen asleep on my shoulder, although I had no doubt he would wake if Duncan needed help.  I lay with my chin and one arm resting on top of the footboard.  I watched Duncan with my eyes half-closed, on the verge of dozing off myself in the somber silence.  MacCready slumped half in his chair and half on the bed, snoring softly as he held Duncan’s tiny hand.  

Since we’d arrived, I’d seen no visible movement from Duncan.  He was still in a coma, apparently.  My gaze traced the contours of the gas mask, picturing the little face beneath.  I studied the skin of his exposed arms, noting the dark boils as much as the generally pinker tone.  I watched the blue and yellow blanket and couldn’t tell if I could see him breathing or if that was just wishful thinking.  Tiny fingers twitched and curled around MacCready’s thumb.  

I jolted in surprise.  “RJ!”  My shout seemed so much louder in the near silence of the barn.  

Eclair jerked awake behind us and Arcade pulled his legs underneath him in an automatic attempt to stand until he noticed why I spoke.  MacCready’s eyes snapped open and he glanced my way before he felt the tiny hand gripping his own.  

“Duncan!”

The boy said something, but his voice was too weak and muffled for any of us to hear him.  MacCready’s voice broke.  “Everything’s going to be okay, just like I told you.  You just rest.”

Duncan murmured something else and I guess his father was just trying to answer any questions he might have asked.  “You need that mask for now because it’ll keep the rest of us from getting sick, too.  You only need to wear it a few more days,” he glanced at Arcade for confirmation and the tired doctor nodded, “after that, you can take it off.  Once you’re feeling better, we’re going to a new home, okay?  It’s a long trip, but there are other kids there and I know you’re going to like it.”

He was practically in tears and even I felt a bit awkward witnessing this personal moment.  I looked at Arcade and whispered so no one else could hear.  “Is Duncan going to recover?”

He answered just as quietly, “Well, the fact that he’s conscious means he should recover.  I gave him the highest dose that seemed safe, so it should have killed enough bacteria that he’ll be fine, now the main concern is residual damage to his lungs, but a stimpak should fix that once he’s strong enough.  I’ll probably need to give him a half dose.  Aside from that, we just need to hope no one else gets sick, I don’t have the supplies to create enough antibiotic to treat a grown man, and finding those supplies would take days if not weeks.”

“If Duncan’s recovering and wearing the gas mask, is there still a risk of infection?”

Eclair frowned at us, but we ignored him.  Arcade shrugged.  “His cough is the main concern, so we should be safe from the airborne virus, at least, but there’s still the fleas that carry the disease, and until he’s completely better, touching Duncan could spread the plague.”  

I glanced pointedly at MacCready, who was hugging his son.

Arcade sighed softly.  “Let’s just hope MacCready doesn’t have any cuts or scrapes.”  Neither of us were going to ask him not to touch his son who’d nearly died.  

Duncan recovered more quickly than I’d ever expected.  Arcade dosed him with a portion of a stimpak once the buboes healed and a blood test showed no plague.  In a week and a half, he concluded that Duncan was ready to travel.  We spent one last day on the farm, returning the borrowed medical supplies with a warning, gathering what we could use and carry, and separating the most contaminated items to be burned.  I did most of the packing and burning while MacCready tended to his son.  Arcade took the supplies to Megaton so he could explain the danger to the doctor in more detail than MacCready or I knew.  Eclair spent most of the day asleep.  I hadn’t paid attention to him while Duncan recovered, so I figured he’d been staying awake like the rest of us.  I’d been trying to be less nosy lately and my efforts to counter my frumentarius training had been mostly successful.  

With the supplies packed and most evidence of the plague already burned, we slept on the hallway floor and planned to leave at dawn.  I woke to MacCready shouting at someone outside.  Arcade sat up at the same time I did.  Eclair opened his eyes but stayed where he was.  We saw Duncan hiding just inside the door, listening to the argument.  Arcade helped me up and I stretched my bad leg as we walked to the door.  We found MacCready on the porch with visitors only slightly less welcome than the fleas that must have brought the plague.  

“I told you, I won’t even _be_ here next year, I won’t even be _farming_!”

A Brotherhood patrol stood across from him and one of them clanged his gauntlets together.  “You _will_ if you know what’s good for you.”  I got the sense that RJ had been using his absence as an excuse to avoid a fight and it wasn’t working.  On the upside, only one of these men had a laser rifle out, the others seemed to have been planning to settle any resistance with their fists.  But I didn’t have any pulse grenades.  

By some miracle, the patrol hadn’t noticed Arcade’s armor badly hidden in a mass of dead branches and live hedges.  The two of us walked up to flank MacCready as he continued to protest.  I briefly considered warning them of the plague so they wouldn’t be interested, but Brotherhood tech could probably keep them safe, or worse, they would weaponize it.  I knew the values the Brotherhood had been founded on.  There was a huge difference between keeping technology out of the wrong hands and lording it over the less fortunate.  Actually, that gave me an idea.  

I cut off MacCready and stepped forward until I stood toe to toe with the lead knight, laughably shorter than him in his armor.  “Get out of here.  You have no idea who you’re dealing with.”  I used Lanius’ voice, much to RJ’s confusion as my normal voice was a bit higher and very different in sound.  

Even without the change in form that usually accompanied my threats, one of the trio stepped back.  The leader didn’t and even if his ally would have pleaded with him, he spoke first.  “Who the hell are you?  You don’t even have a weapon, unless you count that little knife.  You think that can even _dent_ my armor?  This is just too easy.  Learn what’s good for you.  The Brotherhood runs these lands.  You owe your lives to us for the water we provide, without us, there wouldn’t even be life out here!”

I scoffed.  “ _We_ owe _you_?  We don’t owe you anything!  Out west, the Brotherhood’s just a ghost, just another dead gang like the mafia.  You don’t even deserve to call yourselves Brotherhood anymore; the _principles_ of the Brotherhood—”

“Don’t lecture _me_ on the principles of the Brotherhood, you savage!”

That got to me.  In some old books I saw my kind called savages, whether that kind was skinwalkers, Native Americans, or just people who chose nature over technology.  I snarled and then continued, “The _Brotherhood_ was founded on the notion of keeping technology out of the wrong hands.  Not creating more powerful weapons.  Not stealing and using any weapons you can find, regardless of the cost of innocent lives.  Not providing services with no cost, essentials that everyone should have freely, and then coming around to demand payment.  This is how _revolutions_ happen.  Acting like this, you’ll be destroyed just like the West Coast Brotherhood.”

Power armor made it very difficult to judge his response.  While the patrol remained silent, Arcade stepped up beside me.  “I destroyed the last bunker myself.  Back off.”  I think he was trying to intimidate them as well and just hoping they would leave.  I picked up a note of uncertainty in his voice.  He wasn’t a good liar, and he couldn’t bluff well even when he spoke what was technically true, but hopefully they couldn’t tell as well as I could.  

The lead knight finally broke his silence.  “…murderers!”  He tried to execute a take-down I saw coming.  I dodged the grab and jumped his leg when he swept it under me.  The knight in back tried to shoot and Arcade with his gauss rifle shot first.  Power armor flew through the air like a rag doll as I dodged another punch and drew my machete.  

“Jeez!” RJ exclaimed, “You’ve gotten better with that thing!”

I ducked another punch blocked the next with my arm.  Understandably, the force shattered all three bones and the limb flopped backwards around his fist as if he’d punched a rubber chicken.  I forced myself not to react and grinned into his tinted visor unblinkingly.  He drew back for another punch and the bones reformed before he threw it.  I heard MacCready gag behind me.  

I smacked my palm against the knight’s helmet, finger’s spread to block as much of his vision as possible.  Before he could pull me off of him, I stepped onto his shoes, pressing my body against his armor to dodge the punch he threw wildly and knowing he couldn’t feel where I was.  With my free left hand, I sank my machete into his neck through the gap between his helmet and pauldron.  There was a seal, but not solid armor, though I heard my knife cut through tubes and wires before piercing his skin and then his heart.  This was my go to method for killing armored enemies.  Most people couldn’t risk such an exposed move and thus people weren’t prepared to effectively fight it.  I couldn’t run, but my arms were still fast.  

I stepped back off the armor that now held a corpse and saw the knight who’d balked at my first threat already fleeing down the hillside.  Arcade sighed.  “Hopefully he isn’t just running to tell them where to find us.  We should get going.”

We set off within the hour.  At Arcade’s request, we moved as quickly as possible on that first day, lest the Brotherhood catch up with us.  I carried Duncan and most of the supplies while RJ and Arcade stayed ready to shoot anything Geiger didn’t scare off.  Eclair brought up the rear and I walked beside him.  He wasn’t used to all this walking, but he insisted he was fine and that he could handle the pace.  I wasn’t so sure, but I didn’t dispute it.  He trudged along with less gear than anyone else and he was panting heavily within the first hour.  I figured he just wasn’t in good shape and wasn’t surprised when he fell asleep as soon as we stopped for the night.  

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> From the description MacCready gives in game, Duncan's illness really does sound like the Black Death, although there is a disease in Fallout with similar symptoms. I could see it being either.


	22. The Infection

The next morning Eclair started coughing.  All of us realized the likely reason except Duncan; we didn’t need to explain it to each other.  We tried to stop, but the Brotherhood found us, another conflict that ended much the same as the previous one and just as quickly.  We had to keep moving.  As the medical expert, Arcade became our default leader.  At his suggestion, MacCready and Duncan kept their distance from the rest of us even to the point of staying next door with Geiger when we stopped.  I traveled with Eclair even more than I had been doing, partly because he needed the help to keep up with the rest of us, but mostly because having already spent so much time around the cook had convinced Arcade that I was indeed immune to infection.  Eclair and I prepared our own meals and Arcade and the MacCreadys each cooked for themselves.  Between traveling and tending to Eclair as best as he could, Arcade only left his power armor to sleep.  I even tried to keep my distance from him, incase I could carry the plague, but he told me I needn’t bother as he had to remove his gauntlets sometimes to examine Eclair or give him what medicine we could find.  It wasn’t antibiotics, just low-dose painkillers and a vial we were lucky enough to find of a serum that had immune-boosting properties, according to Arcade.  I wasn’t optimistic, and I don’t think anyone was.  Every day, Eclair looked more exhausted.  His skin got paler and the blue boils that weren’t as prevalent on him as they had been on Duncan became larger and darker.  His cough got worse and soon he started coughing blood more badly than I ever had.  

When we stopped to rest on the fifth night of the trip, Eclair, Arcade, and I stayed in an old furniture store.  Duncan and MacCready took the office across the street, with Geiger stretched out in front of the door.  His glowing eyes looked wide with worry.  I could see him watching us as I looked through the windows, scanning the streets and hoping nothing dangerous would be drawn to Eclair’s constant coughing.  

After checking on the chef, Arcade walked over to me.  “His blood pressure’s dropped even further.”  He took out a towel and a half-empty bottle of vodka to sterilize his hands as best as he could.  “His lungs must be bleeding even more badly, or else the infection’s in his blood and he’ll probably be dead by morning.”  It was a grim prognosis, but not surprising.  He’d been delirious a few times today, once I’d had to pull him along so he didn’t wander off.  If we’d been able to stop, or if we had antibiotics, he might have lived, but it was in his lungs now and we just didn’t have the resources— be it time or medicine— to save him.  I liked Eclair, but I didn’t know him well.  I’d hated to bite Vulpes even when he’d insisted, but I’d hoped that I wouldn’t need to bite Eclair.  But now it was too late; even if I turned him into a skinwalker, he would never survive.  The problem was, when I did bite someone, I had to be in canine form.  I couldn’t guarantee that I could control myself in that form.  There were exceptions.  The instincts that controlled that body more than my own brain saw Arcade, and Vulpes, and even MacCready as my `pack.’  I knew they were not enemies even if I lost myself to that form.  But when I bit Vulpes, I still had to hold myself back from attacking him.  If I was just near other humans, I could focus on something else and control myself.  At the farm, I could focus on hunting rats, when I thought rats had been the source of this disease.  If I tried to bite Eclair, I would more than likely attack him.  And I couldn’t risk that especially because the aftermath, or trying to pull me off of him, might infect Arcade.  

I walked over to sit beside Eclair while Arcade cleared off the cleanest of the beds.  Eclair smiled, “You gonna ask me to stop this coffin?”  He laughed at a joke I didn’t get and the laugh became a coughing fit that took several minutes to end.  He groaned.  

“You don’t need to talk if you don’t want to.”

He grinned again, but this time it didn’t reach his eyes.  “I think it’s a bit late if you’re saying I should rest.”

I stopped and frowned.  Had he overheard Arcade?

“Yeah, I know,” Eclair chuckled grimly, “I’m not going to make it.  We don’t have that medicine we gave Duncan.”  He looked wistfully across the street.  “I’m just glad the kid pulled through.  MacCready’s had it rough out here, he didn’t need his little boy added to the list of people he lost.”

“He doesn’t need you added to that list either,” I countered, handing him a glass of water.  

He frowned at me, then looked away and started coughing again.  He drank the water just to soothe his throat and his lips left red streaks on the glass.  “We aren’t even that close.  I grew up with him, but so did about fifty other kids, at least, I’m just one of the few who’s still alive.  Besides, I should have been added to the list a long time ago.”  

I sighed.  Comforting the dying had never been one of my skills.  If I couldn’t try to help like a man, I could at least try to help like a dog.  Eclair lay on a couch, so I pulled up a chair and sat beside him.  I didn’t know what to say, so I didn’t speak, I just stayed beside him.  I don’t know if it helped, but I liked to think it did.  

At some point a few hours later, Eclair’s coughing quieted a bit and I realized that he’d dozed off.  I went to join Arcade on the bed, thinking he was already asleep as well.  He wasn’t.  He looked deep in thought.  When I lay down beside him, he asked softly, “Did you see any hospital or medical buildings in the past few days?”

“None intact.”  I sighed again, “Arcade, it’s too late.  We didn’t see anywhere we could have found the medicine and there wasn’t any time to stop and make it.  We used up our miracle saving Duncan.  There just wasn’t any way to save Eclair.”  He stared at me with a trace of judgement.  “You’re a doctor.  You win some, you lose some.”

Judgement gave way to frustration and Arcade sighed.  “Yes, I just haven’t had to deal with that in a long time.  And I don’t normally know the ones I lose this well.”  He had a point.  Assuming he’d treated mostly acquaintances or strangers, a guy he’d spent almost two entire weeks with was a bit different.  I pulled him into a hug.  This wasn’t easy, but of all the people in our little group, Eclair was the one I could most stand to lose.  

We found the chef dead when we woke the next morning.  I rolled out of bed with the furniture store conspicuously silent.  I walked over to stand beside the couch, and found him cold and stiff.  He probably died early in the night.  I leaned against the wall, debating what to do.  Funeral customs had been something of a fascination of mine as a child, but I didn’t know what Eclair would have wanted or, for that matter, what anyone else would prefer.  We had time for some of the options, but not all of them.  I don’t think we could take the time to dig a grave, and we’d need a patch of open dirt first, but a funeral pyre was a possibility.  The sort of funerals I remembered from my childhood, however, were completely out of the question.  A burial, at least, only took a day.  

Arcade woke up while I considered this and he groggily walked over to me.  When he didn’t say anything, I looked back and found him staring at the corpse in something akin to horror.  

I was sad that Eclair had died, but death really didn’t phase me too much anymore, at least not in and of itself.  Killing was different.  I wanted to avoid killing, even though it was increasingly necessary especially where the Brotherhood were concerned.  But death happened.  Death was a part of nature.  At least he wasn’t suffering any longer.  Arcade’s shock surprised me.  

“What?  You knew this was going to happen.”

He snapped back to reality and ran a hand through his hair.  “I just… I didn’t expect to wake up to it.”  

*       *       *

Zion knew me too well.  He tilted his head curiously.  “There’s more to this, isn’t there?”

I sighed and fought back years of practice avoiding questions.  “Yes, but I’d rather not talk about it now.”  

I don’t think I’d ever admitted that about anything before and I was relieved when Zion just nodded and accepted it.  He was surprisingly good at that.  The thing was that waking up to a corpse made me think of Daisy.  It had been nearly a year, but that still bothered me like so many other painful memories.  I guess it was lucky that the way we were going neither Zion nor I would ever wake up to each other’s corpse, we’d just die in some fight with the Brotherhood.  

Zion asked what we should do with the body and after a moment, I got into my armor for the day and we went to ask MacCready.  We’d all known this was coming since we’d first realized that we couldn’t stop and let him rest.  The sniper teared up, but mostly maintained his composure.  He’d already explained it to Duncan as much as one could explain death to a three-year-old, but the boy didn’t understand and as a result, he wasn’t really upset, just confused.  He asked RJ what was wrong and his father just shook his head and looked back at me.  He covered his son’s ears.  “I guess we should bury him or something?”

“Or something,” I recommended, “we don’t really have time to dig a grave.”  

MacCready thought for a moment and then frowned, “What else is there?  …Isn’t there a thing where you burn the body?  Can we do that?”  It sounded like his concern was avoiding the spread of the plague rather than an interest in fire.  

“Yeah, we can cremate him.  I’ve— er— heard it can be done with energy weapons as well, and we still have a laser rifle from that last Brotherhood patrol.”  I hadn’t just heard that, but that wasn’t a wound I wanted to reopen.  

MacCready nodded, and that was the method we ended up using.  The laser disintegrated the couch as well and MacCready chuckled.  “Vaporized with a couch, somehow that seems fitting for him.”  

We offered the sniper a few moments with the ashes, but he didn’t take them.  “We should get going,” he insisted, “I’m fine and we need to make sure Zion’s crazy ex hasn’t turned the kids into a strike force by now.”  I stifled a laugh, unsure if I found the image funny or frightening.  

We made good time that day and as we looked for a place to stop, an owl called through the woods.  Walking beside me, Zion smiled.  His usual smile had been absent today, no doubt because of this morning.  I wasn’t very cheerful myself.  His sudden joy seemed odd.  

“It’s an owl,” Zion explained, looking mostly at MacCready.  

“Yeah?  So what?”

“My tribe says that an owl call means the spirits of the dead are with us.”

I paused and the sniper grimaced.  “Uh, thanks.  I’m not sure if that’s comforting or terrifying.”

“Both?” Zion suggested with a gentle grin.  

RJ managed something between a smile and a cringe.  “Eclair,” he shouted half-jokingly, “Leave us alone already and go cook something for the angels!  Stop scaring the birds!”  

Zion chuckled and I considered what he’d said.  I doubt he really believed that the owl could see spirits, but I’d heard of the belief he had mentioned.  It was Native American and pre-war.  I’d never really considered Zion’s race and I hadn’t seen his father in human form, but it was entirely possible that when he said `tribe’ he wasn’t referring to the tribal groups that had sprung up since the war.  

“Did your tribe exist before the war?”

I didn’t really expect him to know, but Zion nodded.  “We moved a bit south after the bombs fell, but I think the tribe has existed for centuries.”  MacCready looked surprised.  

Between Duncan and myself, we spent the rest of the night asking Zion about his tribe until we fell asleep.  That was one of the only times I felt comfortable around children: when we were asking or answering questions.  There were even some cases where I knew an answer that Zion didn’t, usually that happened when the questions just involved ancient history and focused less on his tribe and culture.  When Duncan finally went to sleep and MacCready settled onto a mat across the shack where we’d chosen to rest, after both of us had stretched out on a second mat, I turned to Zion.  

“You should know, I met your tribe before I came out here.”

He paled.  “I’m sorry.  I’m glad you made it out alright, I hope Russel didn’t do anything too terrible.”

“It’s fine, I wasn’t hurt.  I had Geiger.”

“My sister…”  His face fell and then he asked hopefully, “She just sent him with you, right?  She said you needed him more than she did, or something?”

I nodded.  “Your sister, Liberty?”

“Yeah.”  Zion rolled onto his stomach and rested his head on my chest.  “You met her?  Who else did you meet?”

“I met Liberty,” I confirmed and listed, “and Russel, and Grey, and … and some ex-members of the Legion, and that was it.”

“Russel took in members of the Legion?”

“Yes, although they did attack him, but they seemed to be part of the tribe before that.”

Zion shook his head.  “Not really.  By blood, my father is still part of the tribe and I was raised in it.  But he brings in other people, and while that isn’t necessarily bad, I feel like… there’s a point where the culture has been abandoned and the people he brings in… they’re just people.  They don’t know the history, or the language, or anything else.  Whatever tribe Russel is running isn’t the tribe I read about anymore, it isn’t even the same tribe I grew up in, it’s just its own thing.”  He sighed.  “Russel took the tribe he was born into and corrupted it.  When I was a kid, he saw the Legion as a threat, and an evil, now I guess he just wants power.”

I frowned at him.  “Are you saying you wish he kept the traditions alive or that you wish he’d turned away anyone not born in the tribe?”

“The former,” Zion corrected.  “It isn’t that he ignored the traditions, it’s that he only used them to support his own opinions.  When I started reading Thoreau as a child, he approved and gave me some speech about how transcendentalism was almost the same as our ancestral beleifs, but when my love of nature made me want to travel, he condemned it and tried to destroy those books.  Growing up, he denounced the Legion for their use of slaves and their treatment of women, part of the reason I was banished was for the time I had served them.  The thing is, looking back objectively, the tribe under Russel’s leadership wasn’t very different from Legion rule.  Russel only keeps the rituals and traditions suited to his quest for power; he forsakes everything else.  He’d try to become a second Caesar, if given the chance.”  

He must have seen the concern in my eyes because he laughed bitterly and explained.  “Russel never will, of course.  He doesn’t trust anyone and everyone of decent intelligence knows he’ll just stab them in the back the moment it becomes convenient to him.  He can’t build an empire alone and no one capable will help him.  Don’t worry.”  There was still some fear in his tone and I guessed why.  

“You’re worried about Liberty, aren’t you?”

“How was she when you saw her?”

“She looked healthy,” I replied, thinking back.  “I didn’t really see her for long.  She seemed… timid.”

“Yeah.”  He frowned into my shirt.  “Russel…  Things aren’t good back there.  I tried to convince her to come with me, but she just… wouldn’t.  She isn’t cut out for the wasteland.  The tribe keeps her safe and good or bad, it’s her home, she won’t leave.”  

I hugged him and thought about it.  “We already crossed the country once, right?  Maybe in a few years, we can go back and get her?”

He chuckled.  “When the Brotherhood and the Survivor have finished destroying each other and the rest of us stop hiding from them, you mean?”

I sighed.  “Yeah, I guess it’s a long shot…”

*       *       *

We traveled for another day and a half at that pace, resting more briefly at night because we all wanted to get back to Goodneighbor.  What had been cloud cover became freezing rain.  RJ carried Duncan under his coat and complained about being cold and wet, although I was just wearing sleeveless combat armor.  The icy metal started to burn where it touched my skin and I tore the curtains off a house that we passed to wrap my arms and keep them warm.  Despite the temperature, I liked the rain.  It was wet and refreshing and I was used to much colder temperatures.  Arcade, in his insulated power armor, was probably the only one of us who stayed comfortable.  

At long last, the Mass Pike Exchange came into view and MacCready and I knew where we were.  With the Gunners evicted from that highway, we decided to stop beneath it to eat lunch.  We’d found cram and wild maize, which wasn’t much but it was edible.  None of us wanted to stop to cook something despite Geiger’s offer of a freshly killed radstag that he ended up eating himself.  The deathclaw ate more quickly than the rest of us so while we were all finishing our lunch, Duncan rode on Geiger’s back and pretended he was a horse.  That was probably because we’d discussed horses last night, given their involvement with my tribe.  It used to be that men would trade a horse for a bride as a form of dowry.  I found it amusing to wonder what they would have traded for a husband.  

RJ watched his son with a weary smile.  “I can’t believe we’re almost back.  I didn’t think I’d ever see him playing like this again, but here he is and we’re nearly home to Goodneighbor.”

“He played with deathclaws before?” I joked and we all laughed.  

“Minus the deathclaw.”  MacCready got a bit more serious and added happily, “I know we lost Eclair, but I thought getting Duncan back here was just a pipe dream.  I didn’t really think we could all be a family.  Things just don’t work out that well for me.  And somehow nobody else got sick either, so this is better than I ever hoped.”

“Don’t say that just yet,” Arcade warned.  I wondered what he meant before he explained, “I’m confident that we can get to Goodneighbor, but we can’t be certain yet that none of us contracted the plague from Eclair.  He was highly contagious and it can take up to three days for symptoms to begin.”

I frowned worriedly.  “Are you saying you feel sick?”

“Not particularly.”  He shrugged.  “I am a bit tired, but we’ve also been traveling pretty quickly for the past few days.  I just wanted to point out that we aren’t out of the woods yet.”

“We won’t be able to get home overnight,” I explained and suggested, “we can camp in Oberland Station and wait until we’re sure none of us are sick.  The kids and Vulpes are probably immune like I am, but for the sake of the town, that might be best.”  Arcade agreed and after some discussion about what and where Oberland Station was, so did MacCready.  We got there well before nightfall and found it abandoned.  I figured I was the only one who’d been here before, so I didn’t say anything.  

Between the three of us, we jury-rigged a tent so we could cook despite the freezing rain, but we only had a large enough tarp for a small tent.  Standing outside in the rain, Geiger whistled at me pleadingly.  He had icicles beginning to form on his horns.  “You can have the tent after we cook,” I explained, “besides, you’re tough, you’ve been in colder temperatures than this.”  He whined again, but sat down outside the tent.  

I cooked the wild brahmin Geiger had brought us while Arcade considered, “RJ, you and Duncan kept your distance from Eclair, so you should be fine.  It might be best if you sleep in the tower and we’ll stay in that shack.”  He nodded towards a hut that was clearly a more recent addition to the property.  

MacCready pieced together the implications of that remark.  “So, if you’re saying Duncan and I are probably fine, and Zion’s immune, then you’re the only one who might be sick?  And you’re this worried about it?”

“RJ,” Arcade sighed, wearing his power armor helmet until the food was ready, “the Black Plague wiped out around seventy-five million people.  I think I have good reason to be cautious.”  

“Yeah, but you might not even have it.  Unless you think you do, and that’s why you’re having us wait…”  

He shook his head.  “I don’t _think_ I’m sick, but I’m not going to risk wiping out the Commonwealth if I am.  I’d rather make sure none of us have the Plague before we go into heavily populated areas.”

MacCready frowned slightly.  “How do you even know Zion’s immune?”

“Partly because I’ve been in close contact with Eclair the entire time he was sick,” I pointed out, “Also, I’m immune to most diseases.”

“But how?”

Arcade might have been ready to explain, but I couldn’t tell, so I answered first.  “You’ve seen how fast I heal.  That’s a disease of its own, except it had beneficial qualities.  The pathogen fights off other diseases and infections and it also causes my body to regenerate much more quickly than normal.”  

He tilted his head.  “So you’re technically sick, it just helps you?  How do we know the rest of us don’t have this?”

“Vulpes does,” Arcade interjected, “but transmission requires blood to blood contact, I’m guessing.”  He looked at me for confirmation.  

“Sort of.”  I took the brahmin off the spit and served dinner.  “Blood to blood contact may transmit the infection as well, but I know that it’s also contracted by bite.”

“Bite.” MacCready mused, grimacing a little, “So you _bit_ him?”

I nodded.  “It’s a long story.”  I didn’t feel like explaining the added quirk that I could turn into a dog.  We ate and went into our separate shacks to wait until morning.  I heard MacCready telling Duncan stories to keep him entertained and Arcade and I had our books.  We read until we all fell asleep.  

~        ~        ~

We woke late that night to the roar of a low-flying vertibird.  I felt fur bristle into existence over my skin, but managed to stop the adrenaline-triggered transformation halfway.  I flattened myself to the mattress and froze.  I expected Arcade to seem groggy, but he lay beside me, eyes wide and one hand on his rifle.  He sat up but stopped moving after that.  Right now it seemed like he didn’t even dare to breathe.  I’m not sure he realized I was even awake.  

We listened, perfectly still, as the vertibird circled and then started to move on.  I thought I could see it flying away through the cracks in the wooden walls.  I knew they couldn’t see us in here, so I dared to move.  My body became human again and I pulled myself into a crouch.  “They don’t know we’re here,” I reassured Arcade, pressing my lips to his ear so no one else would hear me whisper, “We’re safe.”  I knew my senses were keener than his, than any human’s, which was the only reason I risked speaking.  

But he didn’t need heightened senses.  We both heard the vertibird bank suddenly seconds after I said that.  Rotors chopped through branches.  A barrage of twigs clattered against the shack.  Leaves whipped into a small hurricane and plastered the wood until I saw nothing through that wall.  The whirring grew steadily louder.  I could hear motors and engines straining and grinding.  I had smelled the exhaust of vertibirds before, but the smoke filling the air right now was much thicker.  Something was wrong.  The deafening roar of the propellers felt like a stormy sea in my ears.  I couldn’t think.  Instinct started to overwhelm rational thought.  I needed to run.  This was too loud, it was danger, I needed to go.  Arcade had brought his power armor inside and he’d put it on at some point; I didn’t notice he’d done so or that he was holding me until an oak trunk cracked from impact overhead.  Half a tree toppled onto the shack, crushing the roof and the walls beside the door.  A severed rotor sliced off a branch and stuck, vibrating in the floor beside us.  It might have managed to fatally wound me if Arcade hadn’t picked me up to keep me from fleeing the sound.  We watched the vertibird careen south in a tight circle and crash onto the tracks.  

For a long moment, neither of us moved.  I just watched as the wreck burst into flames, letting my heart get back to a normal rhythm until I realized that, in his effort to restrain me, Arcade had ended up holding me completely off the ground in his arms, with one arm across my chest and my legs over his shoulder.  I must have been struggling significantly more than I realized.  

I noticed RJ on the landing of the stairs to the tower, holding his rifle, with Duncan clinging to his leg.  He raised an eyebrow when he saw my awkward position, but I guess he figured I’d been grabbed to avoid the rotor.  Arcade set me back on my feet as soon as I tried to right myself and jogged him out of his daze.  I took a moment to dust myself off and tug a splinter out of my palm so the wound could heal.  RJ studied the crash through his scope and I walked over to speak to him with Arcade right behind me.  Geiger was awake, but uncertain.  He lay curled up under the tent, watching the flames.  

“Any signs of life?” I asked MacCready.  

He shook his head.  “Looks like everyone died in the crash.”

“As much as I’d love to be an optimist, are you sure?”  Arcade had his rifle at the ready, but wasn’t to the point of shooting at the wreck on the chance of survivors.  That was one of many points where he and Vulpes differed, assuming the frumentarius had ammo to spare.  If we did, by some miracle, find someone alive in that burning wreck, Arcade might even want to save them.  I couldn’t decide whether or not I would agree.  

“I’ll check, you wait here.”  I retrieved my machete from the ruined shack as MacCready questioned me.  

“Why should you go?”

“Because I have terrible aim,” I noted, “and both of you have scoped rifles.”  It was a good point.  

I poked around the wreck, but there were no survivors.  I found three bodies, charred to a crisp until only my canine senses even let me recognize them as human remains.  When I came back to the guys alone, they knew what I’d found.  

“Any sign of why they crashed?” Arcade asked.  

“Nothing.”

MacCready’s concerns were more to the point.  “We should move.”

“Move where?”  I gestured at the flames.  “That will be noticed, sooner or later, but we don’t have much choice.  If we travel North, we’re even more likely to find Brotherhood patrols or the Survivor, and heading east will take us into populated areas, which is a bad idea if we’re sick.  There’s no shelter nearby that I know of anyway, just ruins cleared out and destroyed by Abraham.  I came through this place before I reached Goodneighbor, everything’s been devastated beyond safe use, and that hasn’t changed.  That’s one of many reasons I felt this was the best place for us to quarantine ourselves.  We can head south tomorrow, but traveling at night would be extremely dangerous with all the yao guai in the area.  Let’s just hope this is the Brotherhood’s only patrol tonight.”  

They were both silent for a moment after that.  MacCready frowned.  “How do you _know_ that hasn’t changed?”

“Because I can smell that there aren’t any humans for miles.”  I nodded back at the wreck, “Except those ones.  And us.”

He narrowed his eyes.  “You can _smell_ them.  …Okay, that’s about the strangest thing I’ve ever heard from you.”

I sighed.  “Yeah.  Look, it’s complicated, and strange, and I don’t really like to dwell on the sheer amount of things I can smell without even being close to them.  Yes, it’s come in handy, but no, this is really not the sort of thing you ever want.  Seriously.”  

MacCready shrugged.  “I can agree with that.  There are enough things I’ve smelled in the wasteland that I never want to smell that strongly.”  

Turning back towards the ruined shack, I noticed that Arcade had his head tilted about as much as was possible given the shape of his armor.  “When exactly did you pass through here?”

RJ returned to the tower with Duncan and I walked over to mend the shack as best as I could before I answered.  I dragged the tree to the side and balanced the ruined wall on top of it.  It wasn’t great, but it would hold and keep out the rain that continued to fall.  Hopefully that would solve the problem of the fire before it drew more unwanted attention.  

“I came through here just after Sanctuary,” I explained, “Why?”

“Because there were people here recently.  At least, there were when I got here.  I didn’t think it was the same place at first, but I stopped here on my way to Goodneighbor.”  He got out of the power armor and left it in the corner.  I spread a blanket from my bag over the now-damp mattress and we both lay down.  

“I know,” I admitted.  “They were here when I came through as well, but the rest of the area had been destroyed.  I wasn’t lying about anything else, I just didn’t want to tell RJ that there was a family here so recently.  They wouldn’t even consider moving to a safer settlement, even temporarily; they didn’t leave of their own volition.”  

He nodded.  “It’s a shame, but I figured that was the case.”

“It was the yao guai,” I explained.  “The whole settlement is full of their scent, but they won’t bother us with Geiger.  I’m not sure if yao guai would be a mercy for the family or not, given the likely alternatives.”  

“Yao guai are never a mercy.”  He closed his eyes and I snuggled against him.  The people here were dead, but at least we were still alive.  The vertibird might have ruined our temporary haven, but hopefully we would be left in peace until morning.  We could eat on the road, that way we could leave earlier.  Maybe no one would come to investigate before dawn.  

I jolted awake for a second time that night.  This time Oberland station remained nearly silent around us.  I felt Arcade already alert beside me, sitting bolt upright and listening as muffled voices approached.  I could barely hear them over the patter of the rain on the metal roof of the shack.  Lights glanced through the slats of the walls.  Spotlights.  No, headlamps.  Power armor.  I couldn’t see Geiger’s glow by the tower.  Either he’d gone hunting, or he was hiding so he wouldn’t give us away.  From inside the shack, I couldn’t see if MacCready was also awake and ready to fight, but I hoped he had heard our visitors.  

I had no plan for fighting Brotherhood on the ground, short of charging in wildly, and with only MacCready even possibly able to attack at range, we were sitting ducks.  I’m not sure if I shivered or if I felt the motion from Arcade, but someone shuddered and we exchanged a nervous glance.  He couldn’t get into his armor without letting them know we were here.  We just had his rifle and my machete.  He had a plasma defender as well, but he grabbed the rifle first and had it aimed at the door while I strained my ears for any sign that RJ might be able to help us.  

Headlamps swept over the shack, blindingly bright from such a short distance.  I knew they couldn’t see inside and yet I felt terribly visible.  I heard conversation, but didn’t register what they were talking about even as someone tried the door.  There was no lock.  

A bullet tore through metal as the door cracked open.  I heard the gunshot, but lunged anyway, striking the knight at just the right angle to knock him to the ground.  A laser seared my shoulder, but the wound wasn’t deep.  I saw in a glance that MacCready had wounded the other knight with a shot through the neck of his armor.  He wasn’t dead, but I could smell the blood.  He’d bleed out in minutes.  

RJ shot again, his bullet glancing off the paladin, who turned his rifle on the tower.  I let the knight I’d toppled struggle to get back to his feet given the limited mobility of power armor while I lunged at his commander.  I grabbed his rifle and tried to wrench it from his grip.  I failed.  He punched my arm and the bone mended instantly.  I clawed at the magazine and managed to eject it.  He tried to jam it back in.  Probably for the sake of dexterity, he had his fingers exposed.  I bit his knuckle.  I had intended to take the whole finger off, and possibly a second, but I gagged on the taste and the butt of an unloaded rifle came down on my head as power armor whirred to life inside the shack.  

MacCready shot the man’s hand and slowed the strike enough that it only stunned me.  I dove for the paladin again and this time I tore his rifle free and flung it away.  By sheer luck my back-handed toss landed it on the roof of the tower.  The paladin cursed.  

The dying knight hit me from behind to a shout of outrage from MacCready that was probably meant to distract him.  I heard a bullet ricochet off power armor at the same time that steel struck my back and chest.  I think the man grabbed me in something like a take-down, but the armor gave him the strength to break my ribcage and I collapsed.  I landed on a struggling mass I later identified as the knight I’d knocked down.  I felt my healing mending the wound even as I hit the knight’s fallen comrade, but I couldn’t stand and that was lucky.  A blast of light and sound flew over me and struck the bleeding knight like a gong.  His power-armored body toppled like a domino and slid backwards into a small ditch.  The paladin called out what must have been his name.  

Beneath me, the other knight finally managed to stand and I staggered upright beside him.  He reached for a rifle but didn’t have time to draw it because MacCready’s next shot pierced his throat.  I turned towards the paladin and found Arcade beside me, gauss rifle in hand.  He seemed shorter than usual and I realized he was hunched forward.  After the night we’d had so far, I guessed he was exhausted.  He leveled the rifle at the paladin and gave an ultimatum in a surprisingly commanding voice.  “Look, I have had quite enough of dealing with the Brotherhood.  I’ve had enough of the Brotherhood to last _a lifetime_ , really, but for now let’s just say I’ve had enough of you for _tonight_.  Please, leave.  You’ve seen that we can deal with Brotherhood patrols and you really should have figured that out sooner, but we’re willing to let you go, just this once, so get out of here.  _Please_.”

Somehow Arcade could balance violence and mercy.  I wasn’t sure how well I’d been doing on that same balancing act.  I knew how much Arcade hated the Brotherhood, and yet he was willing to let this man live.  Saving a helpless enemy was one thing, letting an able man go free took a more serious risk.  I wondered if he had a plan to keep us safe, should the paladin accept his offer.  But why make the offer in the first place?  Did he have some other reason for suggesting this?  Surely, he didn’t think the Brotherhood would back down just because he spared one life?  Arcade sounded… weary.  We were both tired, but I’d felt a deeper emotion I could only describe as weariness after my last fight with Wolf.  It was that same drive that had left me a pacifist for so many years before I realized that was impossible.  Is that what drove Arcade to make this offer?  

The paladin refused and I regretted the depth of my relief.  “I would sooner help a synth than spare an Enclave soldier!”  Arcade shot him as soon as he finished his sentence.  The gauss rifle knocked him back and rolled his armor down the hill.  In the aftermath of the battle, standing in the freezing rain, I looked around to take stock of the damage.  RJ held a hand to his arm, but the wound didn’t look deep and he gave me a tired smile.  From the west, Geiger reemerged carrying a radstag carcass in his mouth.  I was just considering how to deal with the bodies when Arcade coughed loudly.  


	23. The Last Resort

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hoping I haven't already used this chapter name...?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy Holidays, everyone! ...and this will not be done by Christmas... but hopefully within the week! ^w^'

One cough became a coughing fit and I looked at Arcade.  I didn’t need to glance behind me to know MacCready was also watching him with the same gnawing fear.  

“Are you alright?” I asked softly, though I suspected I knew the answer.  

He shook his head and managed to stop coughing after nearly a minute.  Catching his breath, Arcade murmured.  “Well, I’m pretty confident that you, at least, are immune, considering how much time you’ve spent with me.”  

MacCready frowned but didn’t approach.  “You’re sure you’re sick?”

I suspected that he asked only because he didn’t want to believe it.  Arcade tilted his head.  “I’m not _certain,_ but I have a cough, I’ve been more exhausted than I probably should be for the past day or so, and I spent a lot of time trying to save Eclair.  Even with the precautions I took, pneumonic plague is extremely contagious and it was airborne.  It isn’t likely that this would be anything else.”

I tried to take a leaf out of Vulpes’ book and keep a stoic expression, but I must have showed how devastated I was, because Arcade added in a weak effort to lighten the mood, “Hey, on the upside, none of you have shown any symptoms, so you should all be safe to return to Goodneighbor.”  

“Yeah.”  The way he said it, we all knew MacCready wasn’t any more comforted than I was.  

When the silence began to drag on, I tried to change the subject.  “Arcade, you should rest.  It’ll be dawn in a few hours.  I’ll check the bodies and Geiger can keep watch.”  The doctor started back towards the shack and I looked up at MacCready.  “RJ, when the sun comes up, you should head to Goodneighbor.  Whatever happens, Vulpes should know why we’re delayed and Duncan should be safe there.”  I didn’t mention his own safety because he wouldn’t take that into account.  If anything, the man was stubborn and loyal to a fault; if his son hadn’t been with us, I’d have asked him to help me search the hospitals for medicine.  Hell, I’d trek across the entire Commonwealth to find anything that might help Arcade, but as it was, I couldn’t do it alone.  On my own, I was of more use by Arcade’s side, maybe he could synthesize something from what we had here, or maybe we’d get lucky and find something useful on the bodies or the wreck of the vertibird.  Even if I could have gone searching, I would never forgive myself if I came back and…  But another idea did occur to me.  

*        *       *

I had not expected to find myself taking care of children and a woman I barely knew for nearly a month.  Although they missed their other father and the men with him, they understood the wasteland too well to ask when I told them that I did not know.  We waited with increasing worry as the days went on.  After a week, Israel rarely spoke and did everything he could to keep watch at the window all day and all night.  Jay became convinced that they were all dead and, unwilling to lose her last adult caretaker, she took to clinging to my hand or leg, at first only when I was in the house, but after nearly a month, she did this whenever possible.  Fox tried to convince her otherwise, pointing out his own prolonged absence from the others, but Jay would not be swayed.  Even Fox, who normally took a realistic stance, worried that Zion, Arcade, and MacCready would never return, although he asserted that they’d all survived much greater dangers than this.  He hadn’t learned to lie as well as either of his parents yet.  

With Jay’s constant attachment, I was forced to introduce her to Liberty.  I had kept the woman confined to the first floor.  She was free to leave, if she so chose, but she had not, even to purchase supplies, reaffirming my theory that she had been a slave.  She wore the dress I had given her as well as a night gown that I had picked up shortly after her arrival, switching between the two depending on what she was doing.  Given clothes, she stayed in human form from that point on.  It quickly became obvious that she was bored and after speaking to her, I’d purchased some books and art supplies.  When I passed through to leave the house or bring her food and water, I often found her sketching elaborate gardens and landscapes.  Many were prewar depictions far too vibrant for modern scenery, but some showed the wasteland and sometimes even the Mojave in more beauty than even I had ever seen from it.  I started going downstairs after I put the kids to bed and I would talk to her.  From the sound of it, she had read as much as Zion; she told me they’d grown up in a building built to store books, and they’d read thousands of them.  She told me her favorite stories and I told her about my life, and what I knew of Zion’s.  In a lot of ways, Liberty was very similar to her brother.  

When I brought Jay downstairs for the first time, I carried her on my shoulders so I could also carry Liberty’s dinner.  The woman smiled when I stepped into view, and then she saw Jay and smiled more widely.  “Hello.”

Jay tried to duck behind the back of my head.  “It’s alright, Jay.”  I set the food down and plucked the girl off my shoulders to set her at my feet as I sat down.  Jay immediately clung to my ankle.  

I watched Liberty warily for a reaction.  The woman simply looked glad to see Jay, as if she was reunited with long-lost family —which she was, if she was as truthful as I felt inclined to believe.  “She looks so much like Zion,” Liberty chuckled.  “She’s yours as well, then?”  I hadn’t fully explained, but most skinwalkers would be able to tell we were related from the similarity of our scent.  At least I could.  

I nodded.  Hearing her father’s name, Jay relaxed just enough to peek out from behind my knee and consider her aunt.  

“Your father’s a very tough man,” Liberty explained, “He was one of the only people who ever stood up to our father back home.  I’m sure he’ll be here soon.”  I hadn’t told her when Zion would be back either, but I guess she had realized that I didn’t know.  

Jay had just started to lean a bit further out from behind my leg when something in the town outside exploded.  I heard people shouting and rushed Jay upstairs, leaving the stairwell door open this time.  Looking out the window, I saw the distinct beam of KL-E-0’s laser.  Israel and Fox sat in the kitchen, staring out the window in absolute silence.  When I set Jay down, they looked at me, wondering what to do.  I thought quickly as gunfire picked up and a section of the general store collapsed.  “All of you stay here.”  Liberty hadn’t followed me, so I called down the stairs for her and ordered, “Liberty, watch the kids, keep them away from the fighting!”  I grabbed my assortment of weapons as Liberty climbed the stairs.  She’d come to trust me, I think, so she wasn’t as nervous as when she’d first entered the house, even now.  Jay tried to grab my leg again, but I pried her off of me.  “Jay, watch your brothers.”

I rushed down the stairs before she could protest.  

*       *       *

Inspecting the Brotherhood patrol, I found nothing really useful.  I salvaged a few of the more valuable components from their power armor, but in terms of medical supplies, they only had a few stimpaks.  We still had no antibiotics.  

I extricated them from their armor and dragged the first two bodies to the vertibird, which I searched once more and then left as a mechanical corpse to join the organic ones.  Hopefully the Brotherhood would think the vertibird crash was directly related to the cause of the patrol’s loss.  I was about to drag the third body to the wreck when I realized he was breathing.  Stripped of his armor, he looked ordinary enough, but he was a problem.  He was still unconscious, but he knew our location; I could no more let him go free than I could kill the helpless man.  

I thought about it for a long moment and opted to tie him to a raft I constructed a bit hastily from the felled tree and set down the river.  Hopefully he’d be found by the Brotherhood after we left.  The current was slow enough that it would take him at least a day to reach the airport.  The Brotherhood had their noses in everything, so surely they wouldn’t miss him.  And raiders wouldn’t rush into the river after a naked guy tied to a raft.  As long as he didn’t run into mirelurks, he should be fine.  

I’d left Arcade in the shack, but with MacCready gone, we moved up to the tower.  His cough had already gotten worse and moving aggravated it further.  He had another coughing fit as he settled onto one of the cots in the tower.  When it was finally over, he groaned and rested his head against the wall, eyes closed.  I sat on the neighboring cot, waiting to ask the questions I had.  I hadn’t asked when Eclair had gotten sick because I’d wanted to hope for the best and had no way of healing him if things were desperate.  With Arcade, I needed details.  If his body might fight off the infection on its own, I should let it, but if that wasn’t the case, I needed to know.  If I bit him, and things went badly, it could kill him when he might have otherwise survived.  But if his condition would decline rapidly, it was better that I bite him now and give him the best chance I could to survive.  So I asked very bluntly, “What are your odds?”

Arcade managed a cynical laugh that became a cough and then another coughing fit.  I smelled blood, although he wiped his lips before I could see it.  “You ask that like you’re taking bets.”  He lay down and frowned thoughtfully.  “In terms of survival… it isn’t good.  I didn’t say it before, but pneumonic plague has a very low survival rate.  If I started treatment today, or maybe even last night, I’d have a fifty- fifty shot.”  

“And without treatment?”

He sighed, and then coughed for another few minutes.  This time he wasn’t fast enough to hide the blood.  “Let me put it this way: I have never heard of anyone ever surviving pneumonic plague without treatment.”

I considered that.  “How long do you have?”

Arcade shrugged.  “Eclair took about five days?  It’s debatable for pneumonic plague, I don’t actually know how long it will take.”  He coughed again and when he could continue, he added, “But I’ve heard that it… it’s usually fast.”  He stared at the ceiling like he was weighing the pros and cons of that prognosis.  

Making my decision, I dropped to the floor and transformed into a dog.  Either he saw me change or he heard my claws against the wooden floorboards, because Arcade glanced my way and then propped himself up to stare at me.  I’d let him see my canine form before so he might not be alarmed if I had to transform in battle; I hadn’t expected to do so out of combat.  I’d come to resemble the Legion hounds a bit more clearly in recent years, though I was still significantly taller than them and my ears flopped against my neck rather than standing upright.  

“I will never get used to that.”

I whined.  I accepted what I was, and I used it to unsettle my enemies, but it did bother me when my friends were so disturbed by the change.  

Arcade grimaced.  “Sorry.  This just isn’t a situation I ever expected to be in.  I haven’t often thought about how to tactfully react to you becoming a dog…”  I wasn’t any more comfortable and I guess he could tell, because he waved dismissively.  “You know what, I’m just never going to be able to make this less awkward, why did you, um… transform?”

“I may be able to transfer my immunity and effectively cure you, but it will be dangerous.”  I spoke in a perfectly human voice from my canine mouth and that managed to unnerve him even more.  

“I’m sorry, what?”  

I repeated myself and added, “I can bite you and make you like me, but the pathogen I carry may kill you, and it will be painful.”  

Arcade shook his head.  “I really can’t tell if I’m hallucinating right now or not.  Sure?”  He paused in the middle to cough violently.  I could feel that he had a fever now, although I couldn’t before.  It wasn’t the change in form, he was getting sicker.  

“Are you sure about this?”

He gave me a very serious stare.  “Zion, I trust you.  Even if I’m hallucinating, even if this might kill me.  I’m a dead man anyway if you don’t do this, and for all I know, I might just be delirious, so are you really going to trust my judgement on a life or death decision right now?”  I took the fact that he seemed to contradict himself as a bad sign.  The sooner I did this, the better his odds, I just had to hope that was genuine consent— and that my canine instincts wouldn’t drive me to bite off his limb.  I clamped my jaws onto his left arm just above the wrist.  


	24. Inevitable

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Probably the second to last chapter.

Goodneighbor was under siege.  

I learned later that Ginger had been killed along with the other two adult deathclaws outside.  When I emerged from the alley, I caught my first glimpse of the ruined wall of Goodneighbor and the power-armored behemoth of a man responsible for all this destruction.  Beneath a coat of soot and gore, his armor showed traces of a distinct green paint job.  A thousand dents left the surface misshapen but didn’t seem to slow him.  Nothing seemed to slow him.  As I watched, he dismantled KL-E-0 with a twisted metal machete.  He moved like a force of nature.  I knew as soon as I saw the man that this was the legendary Survivor.  

Daisy ran past me towards the Memory Den, no doubt seeking safety as were the dozens of other civilians scrambling in every direction away from Abraham.  Seven guards I could see pulled their guns on him, but none dared approach the Survivor, leaving him free to raid the shops for more weapons.  He’d level the town if he wasn’t stopped.  

I rushed him amid the smattering of bullets.  Power armor’s main weakness was its lack of mobility and, physically speaking, its neck.  If I was quick enough, I could stay behind him and he would not be able to reach me with that knife, on the off-chance that beneath that black paint it had been formed from silver.  I dodged beneath his arm to get behind him and grabbed the back of his neck guard to guide a leap that let me sink my machete into his throat with gravity and my own weight driving it down into his chest.  I missed his heart, but pierced his lung.  He swung his own blade over his shoulder, narrowly missing my neck.  I leapt up again to retrieve my machete, expecting him to collapse, but he didn’t.  Despite the chaos around us, I swore I could hear the flesh mending within him.  For the barest second, I stared at him in shock.  He was a skinwalker!

Abraham’s next strike did not miss, and brought with it a second surprise.  His blade gashed my chest and although I leapt backwards in time to avoid the brunt of the strike, the wound burned with a pain I had only felt in one previous fight.  His weapon truly was silver, or else a different metal that caused the same reaction.  

Abraham aimed a second strike and before I could dodge, an explosion launched us both into the remains of the wall.  That blast injured me more than I would have liked and I rolled onto my hands and knees bloody and snarling.  Glancing to my right, I saw Abraham having significant trouble righting himself, but I couldn’t move quickly enough to take advantage of that.  I saw the source of the blast at the entrance to the alley, loading another mini nuke into the fat man launcher he was holding.  

“Sorry,” Hancock explained, “I figured you could handle it.”  He turned to Abraham with the reloaded launcher and taunted, “You picked the wrong town!”  

His next shot hit only Abraham, as did the following four.  After each one, the Survivor, true to his name, stood back up and started towards Hancock, twisted machete unchanged despite the heat.  His armor, however, began to crack.  I watched it while my burns healed and the cut to my chest dripped blood onto the pavement.  Unrelenting and seemingly unstoppable, the Survivor reached Hancock, who smacked him with the launcher hard enough to dislodge his helmet.  Although apparently still recognizable, his face was stained with soot, streaked with tears, and dried blood matted his hair and beard.  Hancock screamed at him, “Why the hell are you _doing_ this?!”

Rather than answer, the Survivor caught Hancock’s next strike with the launcher.  He tore the loaded weapon from his hands and blasted away the wall between KL-E-0’s shop and the general store, demolishing both buildings partly by knocking out a weight-bearing wall and partly with the explosion of the mini nuke and all the artillery in KL-E-0’s store.  As tons of brick tumbled down and the dust and ash washed over him, Abraham tore off a large piece of the launcher, dropping the last of it’s ammo to the ground and flung both halves into the rubble.  By some miracle, the nuke didn’t explode, but neither man seemed to notice it.  Even unarmed, Hancock slugged him hard enough to give him pause, but he backed up when the larger, armored man raised his machete.  

I charged again, halfway between forms until I was on the Survivor.  His armor had cracked enough that I could stab through it, so I drew the silver knife I’d taken from the ranger and sank it through a crack near Abraham’s shoulder.  He snarled what might have been a curse and one hand caught my ankle.  Resisting would just get me torn in half, so I let go.  For an instant, I flew through the air before I hit something.  I later leaned he had swung me by the leg and slammed me into a brick wall.  The impact left me stunned and I could feel my bones grinding back into their proper places as I healed.  The silver knife clattered to the brick behind the Survivor.  Abraham swung his machete down towards me and I was in no position to fend him off.  

That was when a bullet shredded the fingers gripping his machete.  

*        *        *

I had Duncan huddled behind the remains of the town wall where he would hopefully be safe.  I don’t know how I managed to pull off that shot so quickly, but when the legendary Survivor turned his gaze on me, I instantly regretted it.  

Luckily, Hancock had my back.  Or rather he had Abraham’s back.  While the Survivor turned to look at me, he’d grabbed the man’s machete off the ground and tried to stab it into his spine.  The tip stuck in the armor and Abraham rounded out him.  He yanked the machete from the steel and swung it at the ghoul, cutting him badly across the jaw.  

“Oh, I’m feral now!”

Hancock ducked another blow and grabbed what looked laughably like a table knife off the ground.  I shot the Survivor in the head, but it didn’t phase him.  After Zion, I wasn’t surprised anymore.  What were these people made of?  

The rain picked up and Duncan started to cry, so, with my gun apparently useless, I slung it over my shoulder and grabbed my son.  I didn’t dare approach Vulpes with the Survivor right there, so I ducked into the building where Ginger had nested.  Three deathclaw corpses, mangled and singed, covered the street, making it obvious what happened.  The ruined office building kept us dry, but I stood by a window so I could see the fight and tried not to be too reminded of the morning Eclair had died.  

For nearly a minute, the Survivor and Hancock danced about in a very one-sided sword-fight only slightly balanced by the ghoul’s agility.  It still took longer than I’d ever expected before one of Abraham’s strikes knocked Hancock backwards on the slippery brick.  The Survivor plunged his machete through his ex hard enough to crack the mortar beneath him.  

Hancock coughed blood.  He gagged and snarled wordlessly at Abraham, who went through the trouble of genuflecting to lean closer to him.  I half thought they were going to kiss.  

“Please,” Abraham whispered.  

Hancock plunged the table knife he’d never dropped into the Survivor’s chest, burying it between the ribs until the entire knife vanished inside him.  Abraham collapsed on top of him, hastening the ghoul’s death with the crushing weight of his armor.  

I didn’t approach until neither had moved for a full ten minutes.  Even at that point, I was the only one outdoors in town.  

Vulpes hadn’t moved since he’d been thrown.  

*       *       *

I’d returned to human form as soon as Arcade was bitten and kept watch beside him for over a day since then.  I only left when I absolutely had to and had not slept in all that time.  Outside the rain poured down on the tower as if a waterfall had relocated.  The roof leaked, but only on the other side of the room and I hoped the wet air would sooth his lungs.  Arcade’s fever had broken and I’d wrapped a blanket around him as the chill of night settled in.  I hadn’t eaten and despite the water I’d been drinking, I could still taste his blood in my mouth.  

I didn’t have a blanket myself, so the cold seeped into my bones and I stayed by Arcade’s side as much to keep warm as to be with him.  Arcade had been asleep since the bite, as seemed typical.  I had no way of knowing if he would recover or die, and the worry gnawed away my hunger.  Hours had become days with me hardly aware of how much time had passed.  

Boredom didn’t come into it; I was too exhausted and taut with emotion to feel that.  Aside from worry, I had only my senses.  I listened to the rain and to Arcade’s heartbeat and unsteady breathing.  I could hear the breath catch like he would cough, but he didn’t.  I felt the cold and I felt that he was cold.  And I smelled the storm and disease.  And I tasted his blood on my teeth.  

I didn’t realize I was singing aloud.  It was quiet, barely audible over the rain, and I kept the song like a mantra in the back of my mind just to keep me awake and hopeful.  I sang the first thing that came to mind, and that was “Blue Moon”.  

I’d sung the song thousands of times in my life and I must have repeated the lyrics for hours that night, my voice barely audible over the pouring rain.  

“I heard somebody whisper `Please, adore me,’”

Another voice joined in, even quieter but just as melodious on the next line, 

“But when I looked, the moon had turned to gold.”

I hugged him so abruptly that I knocked his glasses off.  “You’re alive!  And you can sing!  How are you?”

Putting them back on, he chuckled.  “You thought I was dead?”

“No, I was just… worried.”  

“Understandably.”  He stretched his arm and felt the pale scars where my teeth had pierced his skin.  “I feel fine.”  He pulled the sleeve back down and smiled at me.  “You almost certainly saved my life.  Thanks.”

“I had to return the favor sometime.”  

I snuggled against him and after a moment of hugging me back, he looked out the window.  “We should probably get going before the Brotherhood finds us.  Even if it is miserable outside.”

“Yeah.”  I let go and got to my feet.  I’d moved everything important into the tower, so I was ready to leave.  “We should get back to RJ and the others.  I’m sure they’re worried.”

Arcade chuckled and I tilted my head, waiting for an explanation.  “MacCready and Vulpes Inculta were two people I never expected to have worried about me, but you’re probably right.”

It was a rather absurd idea.  Now that he’d mentioned it, I laughed as well.  “Vulpes, especially.  Imagine; six years ago I fully expected you to kill each other if you ever met, and now he’s babysitting and worried you won’t make it home.”  We both found that amusing.  It didn’t take long for Arcade to clean his power armor and get inside it and I gathered everything else in under a minute.  We headed south with Geiger, hoping this was finally the last of the plague.  

Once we got past the wrecked vertibird, Arcade asked, “Are you still a pacifist?”

I shook my head.  “It just isn’t practical in this world.”

He paused and gave me a long stare.  “Yeah,” he reluctantly agreed with me, “I just wish that wasn’t the case.”  

I watched the rain pool in Geiger’s footprints as he walked ahead of us and we all continued traveling.  “So do I.  Maybe…maybe it doesn’t have to be…”

He nearly stopped again, but thought better of it and just looked over at me while he walked.  “You have an idea?  As much as I’d really like to think peace would be possible…  Look.  Zion, you’ve already done the impossible.  Somehow you kept your kids alive and survived all kinds of things that I think would have killed most… most of whatever we are.  I really want to think that a peaceful world is possible, but more and more it seems that it isn’t.  But you… Zion, if anyone can make pacifism possible, it’s you, though I’m probably very biased.”

I stared at him, feeling my way over the train tracks with the tattered boots on my feet.  “Thanks.  Somehow… When I’m with you, I feel like I really could make that happen.”  I looked back at the footprints and explained.  “I know I don’t always sound peaceful, but I try to be.  Maybe it’s just the time I spent around Vulpes, or what we did, but I’m very good at making threats.  I’d rather threaten horrible tortures than fight someone, and I don’t care if people think I’m some bloodthirsty mercenary so long as it protects my family without forcing me to kill anyone.  Most people will back down if I can say that I’ll bite their throat out convincingly enough.”  

“So you’re saying we just intimidate anyone who attacks us, and that’s how we’ll keep the peace?”

“Sort of.”

“The Brotherhood’s our main threat right now— sorry about that, by the way— and I don’t think they’ll back down if we just say we’re going to knock the Prydwen out of the sky with EMPs.”  

I sighed.  “The Brotherhood would probably be after us regardless.  Even if they didn’t come after Hancock and Goodneighbor, if they ever found out about us skinwalkers, they’d probably try to exterminate us and I won’t let that happen.”  I thought for a moment before admitting, “The Brotherhood is a serious problem.  If possible, a tactical strike should be used to humble them, and then maybe they’d be willing to listen to reason and leave us alone.  Maybe taking out the Prydwen itself really would be the best idea…”

“Whoa,” he turned around so he could face me, walking backwards with Geiger behind him.  “You’re starting to sound like Vulpes.  I hate the Brotherhood, but for one thing, we don’t have the resources to take down the Prydwen, and for another, isn’t that a little… drastic?  Crashing that thing could kill a lot of innocents, although they did park it so conveniently over their base, so I guess the risk is fairly low…”  

I frowned at him.  “You sure you’re completely better?”

He gave a single half-hearted laugh.  “Yeah, I just… I never really thought about it.  If you _could_ manage to crash the Prydwen, it would probably dishearten the Brotherhood and might even convince them to leave us alone.  It might even be worth it.  But that would be a _big_ task.  It would take resources we really don’t have, unless you’ve secretly got an army at your command.”

I chuckled more earnestly than he had.  “You, Vulpes, and MacCready, you mean?”  I became serious and admitted, “I don’t.  I might be able to talk the Minutemen into helping, but who knows how many of them are left.  We could possibly hire the Gunners, but that’s unlikely, and the Railroad has been destroyed even if they would have helped us, as has the Institute.  Aside from Hancock and our little family, we don’t really have anyone, nor do we have the resources to bring it down without manpower.”  

We lapsed into silence and I guess Arcade continued to think about that.  Around ten minutes later, he piped up, “You know, if it uses some type of engine to stay aloft, we might really be able to knock that out with a strong enough EMP burst, or if it’s carried by a lighter-than air gas, we could probably ignite that gas, if I knew what it was.”  

“So we need inside information either way,” I considered and when he agreed hopelessly, I pointed out, “We have two spies, and three if not seven people who can perfectly mimic any voice they hear.  All we need is Brotherhood armor, and we could feasibly get a look around the Prydwen.”  

“We can mimic voices?”  He tilted his head, but resumed walking normally beside me.  

“I thought you knew.  I thought you’d either figured it out on your own or noticed that I could; you were singing perfectly earlier.”

“Uh, thanks, but I’ve always been able to sing well, I just don’t like to.  Not that I’m not happy to sing with you, I just… I don’t like singing in public.  And I had no idea you could mimic voices.”

I stared at him.  “Oh.  Well, wow, that’s even more amazing now.  You really have a great voice.  But yes, I’ve been able to mimic voices for as long as I can remember.”

“Are you doing it now?”

I’d spoken in the voice I typically used, but that wasn’t mine.  Actually, it probably disturbed Vulpes because the voice I had chosen as my own belonged to Legate Lanius.  “Yes,” I admitted softly.  

“What do you really sound like?”  He asked it so innocently and curiously, but I’d dreaded the question since I’d met him.  I’d expected him to figure it out so much sooner that I hadn’t really prepared for it now.  

I shrugged, “I don’t know.”  I changed my voice when I replied, dropping the hyper-masculine growl of the Legate in favor of an almost feminine tone I remembered from a caravaner who’d frequented the Wrangler.  And who’d probably slept with Arcade, as I realized after I said it.  

He seemed taken aback by the voice I used, but quickly concealed that with sympathy.  “Sorry.  I never expected…”  He cleared his throat.  “I’m just not sure how that would be.  I mean, I know it must be awful…  Sorry, I shouldn’t have asked.”  

“No.  It’s fine, you didn’t know.”  I smiled at him and then looked around as Geiger whistled sharply.  Both of us had spent enough time around the deathclaw to know the sound of his warning whistle, so Arcade had his rifle drawn and raised in seconds and I grabbed my machete.  

A trio of power-armored figures emerged from the trees ahead.  They were nearly a hundred feet ahead of us on the tracks, armed, but with their weapons lowered.  They were also downwind and the rain must have masked their sound as well as their scent.  I couldn’t tell whether or not these were Brotherhood soldiers as all three had armor coated in black, probably pitch from the look of it, but the armor itself may have been burnt.  Geiger walked beside us as Arcade and I approached until we could hear them over the pounding rain.  My wild hair might be plastered to my skull and face with the water, but I’m sure my height and build left me more intimidating than pathetic, despite my limp.  Arcade and Geiger were even more impressive.  I noticed after a moment of unexplained silence from the strangers that all of them were slightly shorter than us.  As a group, at least.  One might have been my height and another was almost as tall as Arcade.  That one wore a different model of armor than the others, the same model as most Brotherhood paladins.  

The leader, who carried a gatling laser, addressed us in a familiar voice.  “I’m glad we found you.  We’ve noticed some odd behavior within the Brotherhood and thought it best if we joined forces with you.  You may not have served in the Enclave, but you’re clearly experienced in combat, especially if you took down that vertibird.”  She nodded behind us to the wreck, which was still visible in the distance.  

I let Arcade handle her, which he apparently didn’t expect because he looked at me and took a moment to answer once he realized I wasn’t going to speak.  “Uh, what odd behavior did you notice?”

“For starters,” Regina explained, “we’ve seen several of their vertibirds crash without any damage or apparent malfunction and their patrols have all taken to wearing power armor.  I haven’t seen a single scribe or unarmored knight in the field for the past several days.  More worrying, their patrols and military presence have intensified north of the Capitol, as if they plan to follow the Prydwen.”  I got the sense that she was watching me with unusual intensity, though I had no idea why she would.  Did she know what I was?

“They went to war in the Commonwealth,” I explained, successfully hiding my worry this time.

Regina seemed slightly impatient with me.  “Yes, but that was not so recent.  They seem to be moving their troops north, possibly abandoning the Citadel, but I don’t know their exact numbers.”  

Arcade and I exchanged a glance.  That sounded like the Brotherhood was calling up reserves, perhaps to track us down.  We had certainly been a thorn in their side, but I hadn’t expected a full scale war on just a single family.  Arcade looked back at Regina, “Are you here to warn us or ask what we know?”  

“Both,” Regina replied, “but more importantly, I would consider you an officer of the Enclave despite the fact that you have not directly served under Enclave command.  From what I have heard and observed of you, you have accomplished more as a leader than I have in my entire life.  I would appoint you major, but the chain of command being what it is, and no Enclave officers existing beside ourselves, as far as I know—”

He cut her off.  “Whoa!  I’m not even a soldier.  I was never even officially with the Enclave, I was just born at Navarro, I’m not commanding anyone!”

Regina seemed to scowl, I could tell from her tone.  “You have already been commanding people.  Just recently, you minimized the spread of a virulent disease by guiding others to take the correct precautions.”

“That’s not command, that’s…  I’m just a doctor, I can’t lead anyone.” he sighed in exasperation, “Coyote, tell her.”  I watched him appraisingly, and he must have realized what I was thinking.  “No, you are _not_ putting me in charge of this!  No way!”

Regina continued, speaking over his protests.  “Sir,” she barked the word like an order and Arcade actually fell silent, “you have already demonstrated a clear ability to command others in dire situations, and with no higher-ranking officers left in the Enclave, the rank of president—”

“No, stop it.  Really.”  He eyed me pleadingly.  “I am _not_ cut out to lead.”

“On the contrary,” I refuted him, “I think you’d be very good at it.  Something has to be done about the Brotherhood.  We were just talking about it.  With these three and if we can get the Minutemen on out side, we stand a chance of making the whole Commonwealth a better place for everyone.  I’m not saying you’re a perfect leader, but we don’t have many options.  MacCready won’t want to lead and I can’t say I see him being a better choice.  Aside from RJ, we have Hancock and Vulpes Inculta, so unless you’d rather put one of them in charge…”  His face set in a frustrated scowl and I knew I’d made my point.  Neither of us wanted Hancock in charge of what might end up being the entire Commonwealth and Vulpes was too used to methods both of us would rather avoid.  

“What about Preston?”

“Preston refuses to lead the Minutemen,” I explained, “That was why he put Abraham in charge.”

“What about you?”  I scoffed and he continued, “No, seriously.  You kept your kids alive and you somehow keep them under control.  You’ve really done a lot to keep everyone safe around here.”

I scoffed again, mostly at his last point.  “And a fine job I did of that.”  Before he could rebuke me, I added, “I wrangle my kids on a daily basis, I really don’t want to manage anything else, if I can avoid it.  If you want, I can help you, but I’m not running this thing myself.”  I was a soldier.  Even if I could command, what I feared most was that true command would force me to disregard pacifism entirely, rather than keep trying to spare lives when I could.  Arcade, on the other hand, would be able to handle that stress.  I hoped.  

My doctor considered and then sighed.  “Never tell Vulpes that we refused to let him lead,” Arcade murmured and I laughed.  

“You know he isn’t quite as power-hungry as you might think.  I don’t believe he wants to lead a community himself, he just wants to be a general, or spymaster, ideally.”

“Still?”

I shrugged, “I haven’t really asked how his ambitions might have changed in the past seven years.”

Arcade turned back to Regina.  “Fine.”

“You accept the presidency?”

“Yes,” Arcade muttered, “because I guess someone has to.”

We started towards Goodneighbor and when they followed us, Arcade asked me, “If we’re going to be raising an army, is there somewhere less public than Goodneighbor that we can house them?”  

“If the Brotherhood are after us openly, it might be better to keep them close.  And with the deathclaws, Goodneighbor is safer than anywhere nearby.  I can probably even talk Hancock into joining us.  Hell, most of the town will probably help, given our cause.”

“Most of _Goodneighbor_?”

“They’re not all thugs and raiders.  Okay, they’re rough folks, but most of them should be eager to help make a safer home, or at the very least they wouldn’t enjoy Brotherhood rule.”  

“Fair point.”

We walked a while longer and then he remembered, “Regina, what did you mean about vertibirds crashing without any damage or malfunctions?”

One of the other women piped up, the tall one whom I’d never heard before.  “Over the past week and a half, we’ve counted thirty-seven downed vertibirds, many of which we had clearly seen without damage seconds before they crashed.  In one case, the pilot survived and we found the corpses of the rest of his team packed in the cargo area.”  

Arcade seemed to frown.  “What do you think happened to them?”  

I’m pretty sure we had the same suspicion by now and wasn’t surprised when Regina explained, “We suspect that the Brotherhood is being ravaged by a disease, likely the same disease that killed your friend on the way north.  Did you infect them intentionally?”

“No.” Arcade snapped.  He paused and Regina preempted his questions.  

“We were all in power armor when we encountered the pilot, only Corporal Emerson did not wear power armor when we investigated the first crash and we salvaged a suit for her before investigating any others.  We took the precaution of staying in power armor suspecting a disease and we were right.  The pilot we found coughed blood and was delirious with fever; he died shortly after the crash without answering our questions.”  

“ _Please_ tell me you did not torture a dying man.”

“He was too close to death, he wouldn’t have survived torture.”  Regina answered in a brutally cold voice, but the others shifted about uncomfortably behind her.  

We lapsed into silence for the rest of the walk.  I’m sure Arcade was conflicted.  Infecting the Brotherhood with plague solved our problems and it was their own fault for so persistently pursuing us, but using disease like that was ethically questionable in its own right and the Brotherhood patrols would or had probably infected non-combatants and maybe even children.  

*        *        *

President.  It was absurd.  Even if I was actually qualified to lead, I’d finally accepted that the Enclave was gone, and now here I was, stuck leading the last remnants of the Enclave.  _Leading_.  That idea was crazy enough; if we hadn’t been so desperate for manpower and resources…  And, on top of that, now it turned out that the Brotherhood’s pursuit of myself and Zion might have gotten them infected with the Black Plague.  Possibly devastated, if they were really moving north, if they weren’t just coming up here to attack us, that probably meant that their southern forces no longer had the soldiers to hold the Capitol.  Or they were just evacuating anyone who seemed healthy.  

I didn’t care about hiding, at this point I just wanted to get to Goodneighbor before any more disasters happened, so we walked past the front gate of Diamond City.  I was preoccupied with my thoughts on the Brotherhood and my unexpected command, so it took me a moment to notice the man who recognized me.  

“Arcade!”  Sturges ran up to me (I’d learned his name from Preston on my first trip to Goodneighbor.)  He wore a tool belt and I guessed he’d been working on the turrets outside the city until he explained, “Doc, Danny Sullivan’s hurt bad just inside the city.  I came out here to get the guards, but then I saw you.”  I trusted Sturges well enough even if I barely knew him, so I followed him at a jog through the city’s gates.  I didn’t really consider Zion and the Enclave soldiers, but realized they’d all followed me by the time I crouched beside the dying man.  

“What happened?”  I’d asked Sturges, or anyone in the crowd around Danny, but Danny himself answered as I got out a super stimpak and strapped it to his leg.  

“It’s the mayor, I saw him talking to a synth,” Danny gasped and then watched me as I tended to his gunshot wounds, removing the bullets while the stimpak did its work.  “Who are you?”  He glanced at the other power-armored people behind me and then at Zion, but didn’t know any of us.  

“The doc’s a friend,” Sturges explained, “he got me and the others here safely, with Preston’s help.”  He looked up at the elevator to the mayor’s office and shook his head.  

“The Institute’s gone,” Zion remarked behind me, “Did you hear anything this synth said?”

Danny nodded at Zion, already feeling better.  “That’s about what I heard him say, how’d you know?”  He sounded suspicious, but Zion refuted him.  

“I knew the Survivor before all this and he made it into the Institute.  After what he’s done since he’s left, I can’t imagine the Institute survived his visit.”

That seemed to convince Danny, who was now well enough that we both stood up.  Danny leaned on the railing behind him.  “That should be enough that I’ll recover.”  He glanced at me and added, “Right?”  When I nodded, he looked up towards the office, but Zion spoke first.  

Already starting towards the stairs, my stunningly muscular boyfriend suggested.  “Arcade, we’re already here so we might as well lend a hand with this.  Besides, we can tell Hancock how his brother is doing when we get back to Goodneighbor, I’m sure he’ll want to know.”

Half a dozen people in the area exclaimed their surprise at that revelation, so I was glad I wasn’t the only one shocked to hear that.  “Hancock is Mayor McDonough’s brother?”

Zion nodded.  “He doesn’t like to mention it.  They hate each other after the other McDonough kicked the ghouls out.”  He started towards the elevator and I followed him.  

Sturges waved after me.  “Thanks.”

“Any time.”  I meant it.  Now that I was thinking about it, if we resolved this problem, maybe Diamond City could help Goodneighbor and the Minutemen as well, even if the Brotherhood backed down or left us alone, we’d probably need it.  

Arriving outside the office in the reception area, the lone security guard trying to open the door jumped back in surprise, seeing us.  “Wh-who are you?  State your business!  We have a situation here!—”  He stumbled over his words and drew a shotgun, clearly and understandably terrified when faced with four power-armored individuals and Zion in such close-quarters.  

“We’re here to help!”  I had my gauss rifle drawn and walked towards the door he’d been trying to open.  

“He’s taken Geneva hostage,” the guard explained.  

Regina stepped towards the door and suggested, “It might be best to kill them, otherwise people will think that taking hostages will work.”

“We’re not killing the hostage.”  I checked that my rifle was ready to fire and walked over to the door.  I couldn’t pick the lock and as worrying as it was to risk startling the mayor while he had a hostage, we needed to get in here quickly.  I kicked the door down and stepped into the room with Zion right behind me, following so closely that I don’t think the mayor even saw him.  Regina and the others tried to come in as well, but the mayor scrambled backwards and shouted with more than a note of panic, “All of you, stay back!  Why are you here?  What does the Brotherhood want with me?!”

“I’m not _with_ the Brotherhood,” I retorted, unable to hide how much that annoyed me.  “I’m just trying to help,—”

“Get out of here!” Mayor McDonough snapped, “Just let me leave the city and no one gets hurt!”  He brandished the gun at the head of his hostage, presumably Geneva, to emphasize his point.  

Zion, clearly unseen by the mayor, had been walking slowly and silently around to stand behind him while I tried to negotiate with the man.  Now the ex-frumentarius lunged forward, expertly grabbing the mayor’s arm to force the gun upwards before wrestling it free.  McDonough tried to elbow him in the ribs and then turned around in what might have been an effort to kick him, but Zion, hands busy with the gun, bit his nose clean off.  

The mayor’s wound, which oozed a fluid that wasn’t blood, glinted with metal.  I groaned internally at Zion biting off body parts again, but at least it had revealed something important this time.  Geneva fled the room and Regina exclaimed aggressively, “He’s a synth!”

The desperate man grabbed a chair even as Zion stepped back from him.  His swing actually knocked Zion to the ground, so I guess synths were stronger than they looked.  He raised the chair again and I shot him before he could strike the downed man.  McDonough was dead before he hit the ground, synth or not.  Zion staggered upright, wincing as he put weight on his bad knee to regain his footing.  

“We’ll have to tell Hancock.  I doubt he’ll be happy, however much they hated each other.”  

Geneva was crying behind me and six more of Diamond City security had reached the office while we were sorting things out.  We explained what happened and one of the men snapped, “I thought we were finally done with those synth bastards when the Institute went silent.  I guess there will always be more of those pricks.”

To my mild surprise, Zion defended synths, “From what I’ve seen, synths are just as human as anyone else.  If they would just live and let live, everything would be fine, and there are some who do that.”

The security scoffed.  “Really?  Name one.”  Zion hesitated and he took that silence to have a different meaning.  “Are _you_ a synth?”

“He’s not a synth,” I snapped, “trust me, I’m a doctor.”  Zion stifled a laugh that that was the reason I gave, but didn’t say anything.  I started to leave and then paused.  “Look, things might get a bit more dangerous around here with the Brotherhood.  If you want, it might be a good idea to ally with Goodneighbor or the Minutemen.”  

They paused and Geneva regained her composure to some extent.  “Are you with the Minutemen?”

“No.”

Zion added optimistically, “But we’re hoping to ally with them soon.”

They all looked very confused and overwhelmed, but it seemed incredibly risky to delay returning to Goodneighbor with the Brotherhood possibly on the verge of attacking it or us, so we left them to sort things out on their own.  At least they had walls, keeping them safe from the rest of the dangers of the Commonwealth.  

When we got to Goodneighbor, we found a city in the midst of a crisis.  Geiger ran ahead before we even got within sight, so Zion and I exchanged a glance, but we just drew our weapons and kept moving.  Regina had barely spoken and her companions had been completely silent almost since we’d met them.  We heard Geiger howl and then we ran.  

The deathclaw stooped beside the rotted corpse of what was clearly Ginger.  Two other deathclaws lay dead and dismembered outside the demolished wall of Goodneighbor.  We could see most of the general store had been reduced to a pile of rubble as had a large portion of the city walls.  City guards filled the gap, hunkered behind barriers obviously taken from the Gunners.  Seeing the destruction, Zion ran ahead, managing to sprint despite his leg.  He vanished down the alley towards his house and I paused at the guards.  I would have stopped anyway, but the guards moved to block me and the Enclave soldiers.  I guessed the town had formed a militia to protect themselves, but didn’t recognize them nor did they recognize me at first.  “State your—”

I spoke over the guard, “What happened here?”  When he eyed me suspiciously, I explained, “I’ve been with Coyote since I got here, I know MacCready, hell, _Hancock_ knows me, just let me talk to him—!”

“Hancock’s dead.”

I stared at him and then looked over the damage again.  “Did the Brotherhood—?”

“No, the Survivor.  Hancock killed him as well.”

I started to ask if anyone else had been hurt when RJ ran over to us.  He looked over the other power-armored figures with an uncertain stare and then turned to me.  “Uh, you brought friends?  Good, we need all the help we can get.  And power armor’s always good.  Which one is Coyote?”

“None of us, I’m afraid.” Regina answered.  

Before MacCready could get too upset, I clarified, “Zion ran ahead.”  I glanced in the direction RJ had come from and realized, “You set up snipers’ nests?”

He nodded, “Vulpes’ idea.”

“It seemed prudent, considering the loss of much of our outer wall and the threat of vertibirds,” the frumentarius explained, approaching from across the courtyard.  He looked over the group with me.  “Hello, I’m glad to see you decided to come north.  If you are willing to assist us…”  

I realized he was addressing the women and looked rapidly between them.  “You know each other?”

“We met him briefly in Bethlehem.” Regina explained, “He was also being pursued by the Brotherhood.”

I sighed.  “Lovely.  Is there anyone in this town that the Brotherhood doesn’t want dead?”

“At this point,” Vulpes assured me, “I am quite sure that the Brotherhood would gladly wipe this settlement off the map.  Also, we have a guest.”

I wondered what he meant and then a familiar voice cried out, “Arcade! It’s good to see you again!”

*       *       *

Inside my house, I was greeted by perhaps the last person I expected to find.  

“Zion!” Liberty called amid the shouts of “Daddy!” from my kids.  Jay and Fox tackled my legs and I shuffled across the floor to hug Israel as well.  

“Liberty!”  I addressed her amid a sea of hugs and children so happy and relieved that they were all crying.  “How?  When did you get here?  Are you okay?”

She wore a stunning dress I’d never seen before.  It was exactly the sort of thing she loved to wear.  She straightened the hem of the skirt as she answered, “I headed east a little while after Arcade left.  I’m fine now.  I’ve been watching the kids while Vulpes and MacCready manage the town.”  She studied me for a few moments as I stood, reassured my own kids that everything was okay, and spotted Duncan silently eating at the end of the table.  

“Arcade and I are safe and sound,” I assured Duncan, “We’re going to be busy for a while until we make sure this whole area is safe, but after that we’ll all be a family together, okay?”  He sucked on the end of his fork and nodded.  I’d come to suspect that he felt guilty for being sick, or possibly blamed himself for Eclair’s death, so I was trying to comfort him.  He’d certainly been quiet.  We’d distracted him with curiosity, but when he wasn’t asking questions, he hardly made a sound.  

“You… you really look a lot like Russel,” Liberty pointed out uncomfortably.  

I sighed.  “I’m _not_ Russel.  Liberty, you know me.  Even at my worst, I wasn’t Russel, and I’ve made an effort to be more peaceful.”

She backtracked.  “I know.  I just… I guess I wasn’t prepared for how much you look like him now.  I know you’re a man, I just didn’t realize you were going to look this different.  Not that it’s a _bad_ thing—”

“It’s fine,” I smiled to head off her panic.  “Liberty, this is me.  I’m not going to freak out.”

“I know, I just…  I don’t want to hurt you.”

“Liberty, you’re great.  A lot of the time you’re a more functional person than I am.”  I grabbed a drink of water now that I was sure the kids were okay and quickly checked the house for anyone else I knew.  I found no one, but the door opened as I searched and I expected Arcade to be joining us when I concluded to Liberty.  “You’re wonderful, I’m glad you made it out here.”  

“As am I.”  Vulpes, stealthy as always, spoke from directly behind me.  When I looked back, he explained, “Liberty arrived before MacCready returned and I allowed her to sleep downstairs separated from the children until the town was attacked.  What she told me was certainly true, so that restriction is no longer necessary.”  He paused and added more softly, “Nor is any other.”  I realized he was addressing Liberty rather than myself and grinned, looking between the two of them as they smiled at each other, Vulpes with his confident but caring smirk and Liberty with her own uncertain grin.  They’d be a good match.  

I glanced over the kids, all focused again on their meal and their own conversations, debating what their nicknames were based on something RJ had told them.  “I’ll go find Arcade,” I announced and left the house.  I was glad Vulpes seemed happy with my sister, I’d felt bad letting him carry on a relationship with me and basically using him, so at least it had worked out for the best in the end.  

I found Arcade in the courtyard, talking to percisely the man we needed to speak to. 


	25. Operation Icarus

Preston Garvey greeted me as I approached and shook my hand, “Arcade tells me you’re trying to go after the Brotherhood.  That’s good.  The Minutemen have been looking to do the same thing.  After we took back the Castle, we found schematics for artillery and heavy weapons.  We’ve lost all our northern forces as far as we know, so if Goodneighbor will help us… that would really get us closer to making this possible.”  

“Sir?”  It was the tall power-armored woman, the one who had only spoken once before.  It took everyone a second to realize she was addressing Arcade, and when MacCready realized that, he frowned in confusion.  Arcade must not have explained who they were or why they were helping us. 

The doctor sighed.  “What is it?”  He was trying to be polite, but he clearly didn’t like to lead.  

“Sir, Lieutenant Romero might be able to construct a wide variety of weapons and turrets from spare parts.  And if we want to, and if we can find one, I can fly a vertibird pretty well.”  

He looked at her and I tilted my head, realizing for the first time that the tones of their voices were a bit similar, if very different in pitch.  “Yeah.  Actually, that could be helpful.”  Arcade backtracked and deferred to Preston, “If you think so?”

The minuteman looked completely stunned by that entire revelation.  “Yeah, a vertibird might just turn the tide.”

“The tide might be turning on its own,” I noted, nodding to a vertibird over the city as it spun wildly and dropped into a violent descent, crashing somewhere near the hospital.  

We summoned Vulpes to a vacant house where the eight of us figured out our plan.  Vulpes would take power armor from a Brotherhood soldier, learning their voice and identity to masquerade as them.  He would use the disguise to enter the Prydwen and learn what kept it airborne.  Armed with that knowledge, he’d return to Goodneighbor where we would have already set up defenses.  We’d bring Minutemen here and set up as many snipers and as much artillery and turrets as we could manage, in case things turned against us.  Fahrenheit had the less trustworthy civilians clearing the tunnel in Bobbi’s old place so the whole town could escape underground if things went badly for us.  The Enclave ladies hadn’t taken off their armor and neither had Arcade, even as we decided what they’d be doing and discussed where they would spend the night.  Regina would manage a task force prepared to defend the town and basically just operate as a soldier, considering she was the most experienced and well armed person aside from Arcade, Vulpes, MacCready, and myself.  Romero would handle the vertibird repairs and instruct the building of most of the non-human defenses while Phoebe, who seemed the least experienced, would pilot the vertibird if it could be salvaged.  

We decided that they could sleep in the same house where we’d held the meeting and that everyone could store their armor in there.  After a brief confirmation from Arcade that they would be sick by now if they’d contracted the plague, everyone exited their power armor.  Preston left to contact his men, but RJ, Vulpes, and I waited for Arcade.  For ease of access, they all faced the wall so the armor was out of the way and opened towards the walkway, so we noticed the similarities before any of them did.  MacCready commented first.  “No way…”

Arcade turned to look at him and froze when he caught sight of Phoebe and realized what the sniper meant.  His jaw dropped.  

“You have a sister?” RJ asked, half-joking and both Arcade and Phoebe frowned at him because their age difference implied he was either insulting Phoebe or flattering Arcade and I’m sure both assumed the former.  

“Surely you knew this before,” Vulpes remarked calmly, “I had assumed you must have seen each other and joined forces because you were kin.”

“Uh, no, I had no idea we were related,” Arcade responded before staring at Phoebe, “Who are you?”

“Phoebe Emerson,” Phoebe began to say more, but Regina interrupted her.  

“Phoebe’s father resembled her very strongly and he traveled east from Navarro.”

“Emerson’s my mother’s maiden name,” Arcade noted, watching Phoebe in a daze.  

“So we’re… cousins?”

“Probably?”

“Well…” she considered and then broke into a wide smile, “that’s remarkable!”

She hugged him so hard she nearly knocked him over and then abruptly stood at attention, clearly embarrassed.  “Sorry.  Sorry, sir, I won’t do it again.”

I didn’t hear Arcade’s response as I suddenly found myself facing a scowling red head with eyes notably the same shade of blue as mine.  “And you are Enclave as well, are you not?”

I stepped back from Regina’s close scrutiny.  “No!  …Well, my mother was.”

She grabbed my chin, presumably to better judge my eye-color in the dim light, but I dodged away.  “I can tell we’re related, don’t worry.  You’re probably my aunt.”  

“I think we can _all_ tell,” MacCready asserted.  He was right, the woman was the spitting image of Israel except for subtle differences, her age, and her height.  I could tell by scent.  

Regina gave me a long, judging stare, and then glanced at Arcade and seemed to reach some level of acceptance, I guessed due to his rank.  “Yes.  I suspect you are right.”  She narrowed her eyes at me for a moment and then stalked off and I fled the house before she could make things more uncomfortable.  

“Well, that was awkward.”  It took me a second to notice that the speaker was Arcade and not MacCready, but I’m pretty sure we all shared the sentiment.  

“Yeah.”

RJ cocked his head towards me.  “Any reason the Captain acted like you spit in her breakfast?”

Arcade answered for me, but we had the same suspicion.  “Probably because the Enclave isn’t too happy about homosexual relationships.”

His brow creased.  “How do they know…?  _Oh_.”

I shot RJ a mildly insulted frown and was glad when Arcade did the same.  “ _No._   That is not how they found out.”

“Then how _did_ they find out?” MacCready queried with a playful grin.  “By the way, I’m glad you’re alive.”  

Arcade looked more weary than relieved, “I just hope this is the last we have to deal with the plague, but knowing our luck, it won’t be.”  We still weren’t certain whether or not the Brotherhood had contracted it, so I couldn’t tell if Arcade was just being optimistic or if he meant that he hoped the Brotherhood would die out on their own terms and the plague would never reach anyone we knew again.  

MacCready shrugged hopefully.  “I don’t know.  Things have been looking up lately, and now we have artillery and vertibirds on our side?  I’m really starting to think we can win this.”

I chuckled a bit darkly.  “Don’t jinx it.”

Vulpes, who seemed to be in a particularly good mood, asked Arcade, “If you did not know they were related to you, how and why did they end up helping us?”

“They’re with the Enclave.  Regina kind of appointed me their leader.”  He admitted it grudgingly and evasively and Vulpes laughed.  

“Another cast-out Follower, raising an army.”  

“Whoa!”  Arcade rounded on him, “Whoa!  You do _not_ get to compare me to Caesar!”

Vulpes raised his hands in surrender.  “It was hardly intended as an insult.  Clearly the Followers instill leadership skills I had not expected.”

He was genuinely trying to compliment Arcade, even the doctor realized that despite his reaction.  It was just their drastically different opinions of Caesar that turned Vulpes’ innocuous comment into a serious insult from Arcade’s perspective.  MacCready raised an eyebrow at me, hoping for an explanation I didn’t bother to give.  I walked between them and rested a hand on each of their shoulders.  “Let’s just agree to disagree, okay?”

*       *       *

The next day went exactly as planned.  A Brotherhood patrol sought out the crashed vertibird, delivering a paladin into our hands for Vulpes to impersonate while we fixed the miraculously intact vertibird.  With his skill as a frumentarius and his ability to mimic voices as a skinwalker, Vulpes gained access to the Prydwen easily and returned with the information we needed.  Even if we hadn’t suspected, even if the patrol’s condition hadn’t suggested it, Vulpes’ report confirmed that the Brotherhood was being ravaged by the Black Plague.  The Prydwen had been quarantined with hundreds of dying scribes, knights, paladins, and civilians huddled in the Airport below.  The disease had wiped out the Citadel in days thanks to one paladin who had concealed his disease out of pride.  The last survivors had fled north with only thirty reaching the Prydwen, and those thirty brought pneumonic plague with them.  For a day, people were executed at the slightest sign of disease and the bodies burned, but the elder regained enough control to order a quarantine instead.  Anyone who showed the slightest hint of illness was locked in the airport in a room now reserved for the sick.  Only a handful of guards remained healthy on the ground.  From the Prydwen, patrols were dispatched in vertibirds to seek medicine and continue Brotherhood tasks in the area.  They had been ordered to wear their armor at all times and report even the slightest breach of containment, but their doctor had mistaken this disease for something else.  

“They believe they were intentionally infected by the Enclave,” Vulpes explained after he’d returned, “Their doctor is calling this the `New Plague.’  He seems to suspect that it is a virus engineered as a weapon.”

Regina snorted.  “They are correct except this is not the New Plague.”  She looked towards Casey Romero, “Is there any chance they can cure Plague while intending to cure the New Plague?”

I answered instead, “Plague is caused by bacteria while the New Plague is an extremely resistant virus.  Any medication they would make or find for the latter won’t effect the former.”  

“So they’re looking in the wrong place,” Zion reiterated, “and they aren’t likely to realize that before it wipes them out.”  

“It may wipe them out quite imminently,” Vulpes noted, “as those aboard the Prydwen have begun simply dropping the corpses off the airship to dispose of them quickly and minimize the spread of the disease.”  Everyone except Vulpes and Regina openly cringed at that image.  Vulpes changed the subject slightly with a question, “It is true that this Plague is spread by fleas, but the New Plague is not?”

“Yes…”  I expected another gruesome reality to be revealed, or at least another sign that I’d accidentally brought a grisly death to an entire nation.  

Vulpes’ lips twitched with the ghost of a confident grin.  “The Prydwen is home to at least one house cat.  Which I observed to be scratching itself unusually often.”  When I looked even more conflicted by the horrendous fate we had inadvertently brought upon the Brotherhood, Vulpes tried more obviously to convince me that this was for the best.  

“In the end, they went the same way as Ahab,” he stated as if it was inevitable, “their relentless pursuit led to their downfall.”

“And I’m the great white whale, am I?”

Zion grinned at me, “Well, I would put the whole Enclave in that role, but I admit it is a fitting moniker.”

I couldn’t decide if he meant because I was tall and pale or if it was a more sexual joke.  Judging by the silence, neither could anyone else.  

Phoebe changed the subject, “If the Brotherhood is going to die anyway, could we just leave them alone and let nature take its course?”

Zion opened his mouth, probably to agree with her, but Vulpes shook his head.  “Their elder is desperate.  He blames us for the downfall of the Brotherhood, which he sees as a vast empire.  Evidently, he is descended from its founder and fails to see that the Brotherhood has been in decline for decades.  I did not use the metaphor of Ahab inadvertently; this Elder Maxson is absolutely committed to causing us pain at any cost to himself.  He believes that we have doomed the Brotherhood and I suspect he feels that he has nothing left to lose.  He is dangerous.  While onboard, I overheard him plotting to attack Goodneighbor directly.”  

I tried not to narrow my eyes visibly.  This was Vulpes.  If he felt that Maxson was a treat, he might lie to ensure that we struck the Brotherhood before they had a chance to attack.  But this was also Vulpes, the man Zion trusted with his life who had somehow become a part of our strange little family.  I met Zion’s gaze and found confirmation for my decision.  “Fine.  We attack tomorrow at dawn.”

*        *       *

It was determined that I should be the one to disable the Prydwen’s engines.  Hydrogen gas kept the ship aloft and without the engines in the thankfully calm weather the ship would most likely remain over the airport itself when attacked, crashing downwards and ending the Brotherhood for good.  Phoebe flew the stolen vertibird and docked it so I could sabotage the engines and accomplish the second part of my mission.  

The Brotherhood used the Prydwen as a military base, even now, and so it contained an extraordinary amount of munitions.  The sparse remains of the crew were too busy coughing to even notice me, much less question what I was doing to the engines.  I had the ship dead in the air and as they hadn’t been moving it to begin with, I doubted anyone would ever find out.  I continued to my next destination.  

In a metal ship echoing with coughs and the sounds of power armor and machinery, I wasn’t heard approaching the armory.  The Proctor in charge of it coughed into his sleeve and continued cleaning a gauss rifle, never realizing I stood before him.  I shot him in the neck with a silenced .45.  No one heard or noticed.  I didn’t even need to enter the armory and with the place also being used for trade, no one would find it odd as I rummaged through my bag and placed various parcels on the counter, passing them through the window.  No one stood close to me or passed by, so no one would notice that I was not simply passing items to the Proctor, but rather attaching them to the counter itself.  I had brought ten small parcels, each filled with explosives equivalent to twenty plasma grenades.  A final, slightly larger device contained a modified pulse grenade created by Romero, designed to produce an incredibly powerful EMP pulse which should knock out all electronic devices within a mile of the airship.  It was intended to ensure that the Brotherhood’s robot, should it survive the crash of the Prydwen, would be neutralized.  

With the engines sabotaged and the bomb planted, I returned to the vertibird at a casual walk.  No one ran.  Everyone was too sick to run, it seemed.  I was well used to forced calm, whatever the circumstances.  I had reached the flight deck when someone commanded me to halt.  

Turning around, I found a man in full power armor.  That was not overly surprising; although patrols had been ordered to wear armor at all times, I’d seen many soldiers with their helmets off aboard the Prydwen, but some did wear full armor even here.  What was notable was that this armor appeared distinct, likely to show rank.  He was not a paladin.  The armor I had stolen and wore now looked somewhat different.  He had ordered me to halt, so he must outrank a paladin.  What rank did that make him?  How many ranks were there above paladin?  Who was this man?  Better yet, why had he ordered me to stop?

I addressed him in the voice of the soldier I was impersonating, “Sir?”

“Why are you approaching that vertibird, paladin?  I ordered all patrols to cease.”  I knew that voice.  I hadn’t caught it over the wind, with the man behind me, but this was unmistakably Elder Maxson.  It might be useful to know what an elder’s armor looked like; I could replicate that appearance later, if any Brotherhood survived and became a problem.  

“Yes, sir.  I was just on my way to inform the pilot, sir.”

He paused and I found myself incredibly frustrated by the way his helmet concealed his face, even though I benefited from the same concealment.  “Who are you?”

“I am Paladin Earnest Williams, sir.”  I feigned concern and added uncertainly, “…are you entirely sure you are not ill?”

His arm shot to draw his gatling laser and I bolted towards the vertibird.  Phoebe, who had thankfully witnessed the exchange from the cockpit, started the rotors before I was even inside.  

*        *         *

Arcade and I waited to hear back from Vulpes in the make-shift watchtower we’d set up just outside Goodneighbor.  Preston coordinated the Minutemen through a mix of shouts and a second radio he’d set up to broadcast the order to fire.  We’d built over a dozen units of artillery around the settlement and all of them aimed at the Prydwen, waiting for Vulpes’ confirmation that the bomb was planted and the engines disabled.  On the off-chance that the Brotherhood sent vertibirds or other forms of attack, we had thirty-two sniper nests set up around the city with MacCready at the northernmost point and everyone armed with high-caliber rifles and armor-penetrating ammo.  In terms of foot-soldiers, we had fewer forces; Regina and Romero kept watch outside the northern wall with Geiger, in case of attack.  The civilians and less-capable guards waited in Bobbi’s tunnel to evacuate the town.  We hadn’t heard from Diamond City, so we expected no aid.  Everything we had here was the full extent of our resources, the Minutemen remaining in the Castle had been warned, but we hadn’t called them up here.  If things turned against us, it was better to leave somewhere to retreat beyond whatever ruin we could barricade and hide inside.  

I’d left Liberty to take care of the kids.  She wasn’t a fighter, never had been, and I didn’t want her out here in this mess.  Jay had been crying all night, she was so scared, and my sister had her hands full quieting my daughter and stopping Fox in his attempts to come out here and fight with the rest of us.  Israel seemed content to watch out the windows and worry about us in silence, as did Duncan.  

The radio crackled to life beside me and Arcade rested a finger on the button to transmit.  

It was Vulpes’ voice from the speakers, perfectly calm, but that forced calm I’d heard from him when things got incredibly dangerous.  “Aquila, there has been a slight setback.  Would advise firing now.”

Rather than answer or give the order, Arcade watched me while I grabbed the binoculars I wore around my neck today and looked towards the Prydwen.  Two vertibirds hurtled towards us, rotors angled slightly downward.  The one in back shot at the leader with both the mounted minigun and what seemed to be a gatling laser.  Behind them, I saw two docked vertibirds starting up to take off.  

“He’s got company, but he’s right.  We need to detonate now or risk them moving that robot out of range and coming after us.  If anyone can survive a vertibird crash from that altitude, it’s Vulpes.”  When I turned back towards him, Arcade looked resigned and I guessed why.  “I’m sorry.”

He nodded rather than answer or meet my gaze and pressed the button on the radio to broadcast.  “Take that airship out of the sky.”  Artillery roared to life all around us and I watched the zeppelin crumble and collapse like a broken tent.  Burning steel and fire plummeted out of the sky, engulfing the airport below.  I couldn’t see the EMP from this distance, but I trusted that it neutralized their awful robot because I saw its other effects.  The three vertibirds that had left the Prydwen stalled and fell just as suddenly.  The last vanished into the river but I watched the craft carrying Vulpes and his closest pursuers drop down near the old church that had once housed the Railroad.  I couldn’t see them crash, but I saw smoke pouring into the overcast sky.  

Arcade stood beside me as the deafening sound of artillery faded from our ears.  He didn’t say anything.  I don’t think he was as bothered by the hundreds of Brotherhood lives he had just taken as he was by the fact that his orders had probably killed his last living relative.  

*        *        *

By some miracle, we actually won.  It was actually less dramatic than I’d ever expected.  The airship got shot down, and that was awesome, but after that it was all just… over.  We were safe.  The Brotherhood was gone, and the Institute had been gone for a while, and even the Survivor was dead now.  Duncan was here, with Zion, and Zion’s kids, and the whole family we’d ended up becoming.  And no one was sick, at least not with anything bad.  I hadn’t asked about whatever Zion had and it didn’t seem to bother him, so as far as I was concerned it didn’t matter.  

I don’t think I was the only one who felt a bit dazed by the whole “battle.”  Fifteen minutes after the blimp went down, we started taking down the artillery for transport and setting the whole town up so it was livable again.  We got the kids and civilians out of Bobbi’s place and Fahrenheit had them work on fixing up the wall.  Someone found a nest in the building where the deathclaws had been and Geiger somehow found out and settled down on top of it for the next half a day.  Preston went back to the minutemen in some effort to set up more outposts in alliance with Goodneighbor.  Once the shock wore off and the barricades and munitions had been cleared away, it seemed like everyone finally realized that we’d managed to survive.  The party went on for hours.  Whitechapel Charlie came out of the Third Rail to serve drinks.  With Hancock dead, no one really knew what would happen to the Rail, or Charlie, for that matter.  I sort of figured I might take over the bar, but I guess Arcade was our new mayor by default.  Or Zion was.  I didn’t want that job myself.  

I had half a mind to go find Casey Romero, but then I spotted her talking to Regina.  I opted to keep drinking and hope they parted ways.  Casey was pretty cute, but both of them together scared me just a little.  Hell, I lived with Vulpes and used to run with the Gunners, but I’d bet good caps that Regina and Casey could handle every Gunner in Quincy if they put their minds to it.  I watched the girls get some drinks and join the party and I’m pretty sure I was the only one watching and not worried that they’d shoot someone.  They might, but I wasn’t _worried_ about it.  As long as I didn’t draw attention to myself.  

I tried to focus back on my beer and Magnolia’s attempts to sing while a group of drunks kept joining in.  She paused to nod at someone and I followed her gaze, spotting Zion and Arcade as they nodded back.  The two of them were the only folks not high or drunk in the wake of our victory, and really they didn’t even look happy about it.  Zion was Zion, and sometimes I just didn’t get him, but Arcade seemed like a reasonable guy.  What was wrong that they weren’t celebrating?  I wasn’t to the point of really calling myself drunk when I noticed, but I certainly wasn’t sober.  It took me another half a glass of beer to wonder where Vulpes was and piece together what might have happened.  

I got turned around and took twenty minutes to find my way to the building where we’d been meeting and accidentally interrupt Zion and Arcade.  They weren’t doing anything too awkward.  We’d stored a few benches in this room just to keep them out of the way and they hadn’t been moved back, which was probably why I found Zion and Arcade stretched out on their backs on two benches side by side, loosely holding each other’s hands.  They looked like they’d been through hell and even though they were both sober, they just had this air to them like the drunks who never left the bar.  Which was pretty much me before I’d met them.  

I heard maybe two words of conversation, but it was enough that the tone told me they were talking about something sad.  Arcade had been speaking when I entered the room and he fell silent while they both raised their heads slightly to look at me.  Zion propped himself up on his elbows.  “Everything okay?”

“That’s what I wanted to ask you.”  I didn’t sit down, but the floor kept moving, so I leaned against the door frame.  “’S Vulpes okay?”

They exchanged a glance.  Arcade answered first.  “The vertibird went down on the edge of the city.  We haven’t heard anything on the radio since then.”

“Oh.”  My drunken mind had some trouble processing that answer.  “Well, this is Vulpes, right?  He’ll be fine.  Didn’t he say he got shot out of a howitzer once or something?”

“Shot _by_ a howitzer,” Arcade corrected, and Zion raised an eyebrow.  

“He _should_ be fine…” Zion didn’t sound convinced.  

Arcade sighed.  “I don’t know.  I think we might have reached out limit of miracles for the week.”

“He was with your cousin, wasn’t he?”  I blurted it out as soon as I realized Vulpes hadn’t been able to fly the vertibird himself.  

Arcade closed his eyes and nodded, reaching up under his glasses to rub his eyelids.  No wonder they hadn’t been celebrating.  

I shifted my weight awkwardly.  I was terrible at this sort of thing.  “Well… the Brotherhood is gone, at least?  We’re safe.  We can rebuild Goodneighbor, or, well, _you_ can, and we’ll be able to keep everyone else safe.  That’s … something.”

Zion twitched with what might have been stifled laughter or a swallowed sob.  Neither of them said anything.  

“I’ll just go back to drinking…”

“Arcade!”  Regina’s shout echoed through the courtyard the instant I opened the door.  Arcade was on his feet and carrying his rifle before I even registered that she’d called him.  I’m not even sure how the three of us wound up outside, but I found myself standing on Zion’s left with Arcade on his right and a power-armored man holding an incredibly tall, unconscious woman in front of us.  

 


	26. From Hell's Heart, I Stab at Thee

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The last chapter! Not as good as Some Other World, but I hope you enjoyed it, at least. ^w^'

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title is a quote from Moby Dick.

The man in power armor held Phoebe in front of him, a machete against her throat.  She’d been injured in the crash, it was hard to tell how badly, but blood caked the side of her face.  She needed a doctor.  The man was also wounded.  His armor had been battered and part of the chest had cracked open.  I could smell blood inside, but no hint of the plague.  He’d managed not to get infected.  That alone let me guess who we were dealing with.  

“You’re in charge here?” the Brotherhood man addressed Arcade.  

Arcade nodded, shifting his rifle to one hand and raising his other.  “Yes.  That woman needs a doctor, let her go.  We can negotiate.”  He glanced around the town, but I’d already done so.  Everyone had come down to celebrate.  There were no snipers waiting to deal with this guy and he’d notice if anyone reached for a gun when the whole town was this close to him.  Even if Phoebe hadn’t been in danger, it was too risky.  I had no idea if Arcade really planned to speak peacefully with the last of the Brotherhood or if this was a ruse, and I didn’t really care.  I preferred to avoid killing, but after coming here alone with a hostage, I didn’t expect Elder Maxson to ever back down.  He would keep trying to kill us at any cost until we ended his life.  Given his obsession, that might even be merciful.  

“No,” Maxson refused, “Do you think I’m stupid?  This woman is the only thing keeping me alive right now.  You set down that rifle.”

Arcade did as he was told and no one else moved.  I hadn’t drawn my machete and MacCready seemed to have forgotten the rifle on his back.  Regina and Romero watched in silence, standing in their power armor with the helmets off.  No one in the entire town was willing to risk drawing a weapon.  I wondered where Geiger was and realized he was probably incubating eggs.  By my best guess, they would be hatching soon and he might be smart enough to realize that this time was critical for their survival.  The problem was, our survival right now was also pretty dependent on him.  Maxson had his back to that ruin.  

“Kick it out of reach,” Maxson ordered and again, Arcade obeyed, unwilling to risk his cousin’s life.  I spotted movement on the road behind Maxson while the elder grumbled at Arcade.  “After _everything_ the Enclave has done, you somehow survived.”

“I’m surprisingly good at surviving.  Really—”  Maxson pressed the machete against Phoebe’s throat and Arcade shut up.  

“ _Still_ , you choose to test my resolve?  You engineered a virus just to—!”

“Well, we didn’t really engineer it because it’s the Black Plague, not the _New_ Plague, which was engineered.  Yersinia pestis was—”  Maxson adjusted his grip on the machete.  “Okay, shutting up now.”

“Whether you engineered it or not, you planted a virus to wipe out the Brotherhood of Steel and killed countless civilians in the process,” Arcade grimaced, “for your crimes—”

Vulpes, who had been limping towards Maxson from behind, lunged at him.  The machete the elder was holding must have been taken from Vulpes as the ex-frumentarius stabbed into his neck with the silver table knife.  Maxson jolted and Vulpes, clinging to the back of his power armor, left the knife clamped between the plates of metal to grab the machete.  

In the next instant, MacCready drew his rifle, Arcade dove for his cousin, and I charged in to help Vulpes.  Half the town bolted for shelter and the other half drew weapons.  

Maxson let Vulpes have the machete and drew a gatling laser instead.  He struck Vulpes in the head with the massive gatling, dropping him to the ground and knocking him out cold.  I heard rather than saw the laser spinning up and dove to drag Arcade and Phoebe out of the way.  Arcade had paused to find her pulse and I shoved both of them towards the wall as the first beam split the bricks beneath us.  The laser seared my leg open, making my bad knee completely immobile and paralyzing me with pain.  A rifle shot and several other bullets distracted the elder who turned his gatling on the crowd.  Screams rang out.  People hit the ground.  Nobody else shot from that direction.  

RJ also didn’t shoot.  I strained to see him through my watering eyes.  He’d been shot.  He cradled his bleeding hand and his rifle lay split in half on the ground in front of him.  Maxson adjusted his gatling and turned it towards the pile that was myself, Arcade, and Phoebe.  

“You won’t live to try another stunt like that.” Maxson snarled.  

“Oh?  You certainly are doing a lot of talking for someone who plans to kill me.”  Facing certain death, Arcade put on an almost playful tone.  The man would never have survived if he’d been enslaved, he was so wonderfully defiant.  Even though this time we weren’t trying to distract from a last-ditch ambush by Vulpes.  

“Shut up!” Maxson insisted, rapidly losing his patience.  

I chuckled and grinned at Arcade.  “Silence has never been his strong suit; I doubt he’ll listen.”

“Then I’ll _make_ him be silent.” Maxson growled.  He adjusted his gun, perhaps reloading it, and let it start to spin up.  With three of us piled together, and myself in front, we might live for maybe a few seconds, but I’d already learned that lasers halted my healing almost as readily as silver.  Even as skinwalkers, this was the end.  I looked back at Arcade and we both managed to smile one last time.  

I heard a gunshot, but not from a laser weapon.  A high-caliber rifle from maybe a hundred feet away.  The shot pierced steel.  

Maxson’s arms fell slack and his gatling laser crashed to the ground, cracking the pavement.  A trickle of blood dribbled into the pocket around his collarbone where his armored torso met the thinner plates on his neck.  The power armor frame held his corpse in place.  

Still cradling his mangled hand, MacCready stumbled into view, scanning the windows and sniper nests in absolute confusion.  

“Who fired that?”

What remained of the crowd, excluding the dozens who were injured or tending the wounded, crept forward, equally baffled.  I took the time to bandage my leg while I struggled to think what might have happened.  

A familiar cry answered that question.  “Zion!”

Liberty stood in the opened window of my kitchen, Fox, Jay, and Israel all grinning ear to ear at her side.  She had my anti-material rifle held gingerly in her left arm, having no doubt injured her right shoulder with the recoil that must have knocked her out of sight.  

Vulpes, who had recovered enough to sit up while we were all too confused to notice him, voiced my thoughts exactly.  “Impressive.”

**Author's Note:**

> IMAGES AND ART:  
> Skinwalker Color and Size comparison: http://img01.deviantart.net/c9da/i/2016/291/1/b/skinwalker_designs_by_stelladraco-dalf4ra.jpg  
> (Most don't show up until Chapter 16)  
> Also related to Chapter 16 (no spoilers) :  
> http://pre14.deviantart.net/e6ec/th/pre/i/2016/239/1/9/unexpected_reunion_traditionally_colored_by_stelladraco-daffmhj.jpg  
> http://pre08.deviantart.net/0eb9/th/pre/i/2016/243/4/c/unexpected_reunion_digitally_colored_by_stelladraco-dag054n.jpg


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